






O . A * , G^ \2) 





V 














THE TWENTIETH 
CENTURY CRUSADE 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

RKW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO . 



THE TWENTIETH 
CENTURY CRUSADE 



BY 

LYMAN ABBOTT 



A crusade to make this world 
a home in which God's children 
can live in peace and safety is more 
Christian than a crusade to recover 
from pagans the tomb in which 
the body of Christ was buried. 



I3eto gotfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1918 

A.U rights reserved 



^> 






Copyright, 1918 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1918. 



OCT IB 1918 

©CU 5 (Hi 197 



INTRODUCTION 

THE THREE CROSSES 

And when they came unto the place which is called 
" The Skull," there they crucified him, and the male- 
factors, one on the right hand and the other on the 
left. 1 

Three crosses; three sufferers, con- 
demned to death by the courts of their coun- 
try; suffering the same physical pains; the 
same oriental sun beating on their naked 
bodies ; the same fever burning in their veins, 
the same throbbing anguish in their limbs and 
heads. 

And the three all suffering spiritual pains; 
but how different ! One of them a criminal 
whose life had been spent in violation of law 
and who to the end was defiant of God and 
man, resentful, angry, with all the torment of 
a defeated will and a remorseful but unrepent- 
ant conscience. The second, looking back 
on a worse than wasted life, longing to go 
back and live that life over again, the ghosts 
of his victims passing before him, the 
panorama of his evil deeds unrolled before 

1 The Scripture references throughout this volume are 
generally taken from the American Standard Version. 



vi Introduction 

him, a glimmering hope somehow stirred in 
his heart by the patient sufferer at his side. 
The third, condemned for " Love to the love- 
less shown," bearing the burdens of the whole 
world, feeling the shame of the whole world, 
suffering for the sins of the whole world, 
wounded more by the hate of the malignant 
priests than by the nails driven through his 
hands and feet. 

There are to-day in Europe three crosses, 
and three groups of sufferers. There is the 
brigand — brigand on the land and pirate on 
the seas — unrepentant, self-satisfied, self- 
willed, with all the bitterness of a defeated 
will and a fiery wrath burning within him. 
He has broken alike the laws of God and 
man. " Thou shalt not steal." He has 
robbed and plundered nations of their coal 
and iron, banks of their money, houses of 
their pictures and statues, and what he could 
not carry off he has in mere wantonness de- 
stroyed. " Thou shalt not kill." He has 
murdered innocent women and children by 
the score. The score? by the thousand. 
" Thou shalt not commit adultery." He has 
sanctioned, if he did not direct, rape on a 
magnitude never before known in the history 
of the civilized world. 

There is another cross, the cross of those 
who have sinned and have abandoned their 



Introduction vii 

sins. For the Germans were not the only 
people who have exploited the poor for their 
own benefit. Warren Hastings and Lord 
Clive wrote on the pages of India more than 
a hundred years ago a history which England 
would gladly tear out from her records if she 
could. The late king of Belgium is crowned 
with dishonor by the crimes committed in the 
Congo which his noble nephew has done so 
much to efface since by his self-sacrifice. Nor 
can we claim in America to be wholly in- 
nocent. It is true we have seized no man's 
territory. We won Cuba from Spain and 
gave it back to the Cubans; we won Porto 
Rico from Spain and gave it back to the Porto 
Ricans, making them our fellow-citizens and 
returning to them what we received from 
them in taxes; we won the Philippines from 
Spain, paying Spain for all her own property 
in the island, providing the money necessary 
to recompense the friars for their lands, and 
now we are giving the island back to the 
Filipinos as fast as we can. But we are not 
wholly innocent. The auction block has gone 
from the South and no man wishes to bring 
it back. The schoolhouse is gradually re- 
placing the wigwam, though far too slowly. 
But the slums still remain in our great cities, 
though, thank God, there are political reform- 
ers and social settlement workers and de- 
voted Christians who are doing what they 



viii Introduction 

can, despite obstacles and opposition, to ban- 
ish those crimes against humanity from our 
civilization. 

There is a third cross. There are no sin- 
less ones, but there are thousands, yes! hun- 
dreds of thousands of men and women who 
are laying down their lives for crimes in 
which they had no share and which never had 
their approval, who have never exploited the 
poor or been deaf to the cry of the needy, 
who have found in this war simply a new op- 
portunity for the unselfish service of their fel- 
low-men, who looking back on their past life 
might say with Job : 

I delivered the poor that cried, 

The fatherless also, that had none to help him. 

The blessing of him that was ready to perish came 

upon me ; 
And I caused the widow's heart to sing for joy. 
I was eyes to the blind, 
And feet was I to the lame. 
I was a father to the needy : 
And the cause of him that I knew not I searched 

out. 

They are working in the hospitals at the peril 
of their lives. They are sailing the sea and 
defying the torpedo boats. They are serving 
in the trenches. They^ are flying in the air- 
planes. They are laying down their lives 
for their fellow-men. 



Introduction ix 

These are the three crosses: the cross of 
the unrepentant, bitter, wrathful brigand; the 
cross of the repentant sinner; the cross of the 
men and women who are suffering for sins 
they never committed — for sins for which 
they have no responsibility. 

Why? Why do innocent men suffer for 
the crimes of the guilty? 

Because it is eternally true, that without 
the shedding of blood there is no remission of 
sins; because we live in a world which is a 
battlefield, in which righteousness and wick- 
edness, truth and error, liberty and des- 
potism, justice and injustice are in perpetual 
battle one against the other. And there is 
no way in which the falsehood, the despotism, 
the injustice, can be overthrown, unless there 
are men and women willing to suffer for the 
sins they have never committed; to make sac- 
rifices that by their sacrifice they may give the 
life which others are destroying. 

In paganism the gods are feared. In 
paganism sacrifices are offered to the gods to 
win from them a reluctant forgiveness, to ap- 
pease their wrath, or to satisfy their law. 
Jesus Christ teaches that man is not to offer 
a sacrifice to God. God offers sacrifice to 
man. The New Testament is radiant with 
that message : " God so loved the world 
that he gave his only begotten son.]' _ He is 
the author of the sacrifice. " Herein is love, 



x Introduction 

not that we loved God, but that he loved us, 
and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our 
sins," He is the sacrifice. " He laid down 
his life for us and we ought to lay down our 
lives for the brethren." His sacrifice in- 
spires us to a like sacrifice. 

Jesus portrays God as a good shepherd. 
He listens to the crying of the lambs and goes 
out into the wilderness that he may bring the 
wanderers back again and when he sees the 
wolf coming imperils his life, fighting the wolf 
that he may save the sheep. Jesus portrays 
God as a father, bearing in his soul the sin 
and shame of the wicked son, going forth to 
greet him and bring him back to the home 
again when the son's face is turned in pen- 
itence toward him. God offers himself a 
sacrifice to man. 

And what the Bible teaches, life teaches. 
The repentant thief did not suffer sacrifice 
that he might win forgiveness from the 
Savior. Jesus, by self-sacrifice inspired re- 
pentance and the hope of a better life in the 
brigand at his side. The child does not win 
a reluctant forgiveness from the mother. 
The tears, the prayers, the heart-breakings 
of the mother win the child back from his evil 
doings to his home once more. A pagan 
community does not, by its sacrifice, win the 
missionary. The missionary sacrifices wealth 
and comfort and home that he may win the 



Introduction xi 

pagans abroad or in our own land to a better 
life. The sufferings of a country do not ap- 
pease the wrath or win the love of the patriot, 
but never in the history of mankind has a 
country been saved from corruption unless 
there were some patriots that were willing to 
suffer for it. 

This book is written for those who are 
sharing in the great sacrifice in this world's 
Golgotha. Whether they recognize Jesus 
Christ as their leader or not, whether they 
are Roman Catholics or Protestants, believ- 
ers or agnostics, Christians or Jews, they have 
taken up their cross and are following him; 
they are laying down their lives for their un- 
known kinsmen beyond the sea. It is written 
not only for the soldiers in the air, in the field, 
or on the sea, not only for the wounded in the 
hospitals, the maimed and handicapped re- 
turning home, and the dying slipping away to 
their long home through death's bright portal, 
but for the fathers and mothers who have 
caught the spirit of the All-Father and have 
given a son or a daughter, perhaps more than 
one, that the world may be saved by love's 
greatest sacrifice. 

I have some reason to believe that what I 
have been saying during the last four years 
in sermon and article has thrown some light 
on the path through the strange confusions of 
thought and perplexities of conscience which 



xii Introduction 

have troubled noble spirits. I hope that this 
little book, in which free use is made of these 
previous utterances, may render a like serv- 
ice to another and perhaps a larger circle of 
readers. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction — The Three Crosses . . v 

First Letter — Perplexities .... 3 

Second Letter — The Battle of Life . 12 

Third Letter — The Peacemakers . . 25 

Fourth Letter — The Old Gospel . . 36 

Fifth Letter — " We Glory in Tribula- 
tions " 50 

Sixth Letter — "The Republic of God" 61 

Seventh Letter — Christ's Peace . . 76 

Eighth Letter — " Show Me Thy Paths, 

O Lord" 91 

Ninth Letter — Coronation . . . .101 



THE TWENTIETH 
CENTURY CRUSADE 



The Twentieth Century 
Crusade 



FIRST LETTER 

PERPLEXITIES 

So your son has sailed from some port in 
the United States to some port in France. 
The last farewells have been given though 
the last tears have not been shed. There 
are some homesick hours before him. There 
are many anxious hours before you. And 
whether he will come back to be your com- 
panion and perhaps your guardian and sup- 
port, or come back a perpetual invalid to be 
the object of your nursing solicitude, or never 
come back, accounted for only among " the 
missing," you cannot know. Believe me that 
I am fully conscious of what this sacrifice 
means to you and to him. And yet I am writ- 
ing this letter not to condole with you but to 
congratulate you. 

I remember that you have hanging in your 
3 



4 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

hall a sword of which you are the proud pos- 
sessor. It was worn by your great-grand- 
father as a captain, if I recall aright, at the 
battle of Bunker Hill. It entitles you to the 
honorable title of Daughter of the Revolu- 
tion — or is it Daughter of the American 
Revolution? I am afraid I have not a clear 
idea of the difference between these sister 
societies. 

I think you are much more to be con- 
gratulated on being the mother of your son 
than on being the great-grand-daughter of 
your great-grandfather; on being one of the 
mothers of the present war to make the world 
safe for democracy, than on being one of the 
daughters of the American Revolution. For 
you could not avoid being a daughter of the 
American Revolution, but it is your clear 
vision and your womanly courage which has 
made you a mother of the war to make the 
world safe from the Hun. 

If you could only be sure that you have 
decided rightly and that your son has acted 
rightly! But there is no perplexity so hard 
to bear as that of a perplexed conscience. 
And in the tangle of contradictory reports 
and conflicting opinions respecting this present 
war you are not always sure. You would 
accept my congratulations with a better heart 
if you could only be as clear respecting the is- 



Perplexities 5 

sues of 19 1 8 as you are of the issues of 1776. 
Edwin Austin Abbey 2nd in the letters of "A 
Gentleman Unafraid," published in the At- 
lantic Monthly of April, 19 18, puts this per- 
plexity with admirable clearness: " Honor 
demands that we enter the war, humanity that 
we stay out." I think this perplexity has as- 
sailed the mothers more than the sons. For 
the maternal solicitude of the mother re- 
enforces the claims of humanity, and the glory 
of achievement in the son reenforces the 
claims of honor. 

But you are mistaken if you imagine that 
the issue was clearer to the men and women 
of 1776 than it is to the men and women of 
19 1 8. It is always easy to determine the 
path of duty when history has interpreted the 
enigmatical events, but always difficult while 
we are in the midst of these events; as it was 
difficult for the early explorers to decide 
whether the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf 
of Mexico or into the Pacific Ocean, while 
now we wonder at their doubts. 

In 1776 there were conscientious objectors 
who believed that all war is wrong and who 
affirmed their conviction that " the setting up 
and putting down kings and governments is 
God's peculiar prerogative for causes best 
known to himself, and it is not our business 
to have any hand or contrivance therein." 



6 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

There were English-Americans then as there 
are German- Americans now : and they had an 
excuse if not a justification for adhering to 
the cause of their mother country then, while 
German-Americans have neither justification 
nor excuse for violating the oath abjuring 
their loyalty to their Fatherland which they 
took at the time of their naturalization as 
American citizens. Other Americans, who 
had no doubt that their allegiance was due to 
the Colonies rather than to the Mother coun- 
try, opposed the war for independence as a 
foolish and fanatical venture sure to end in 
disastrous failure. And Samuel Johnson, the 
foremost Anglo-Saxon moralist of his time, 
wrote a long and able paper to prove that 
taxation without representation is not tyranny 
and that the only remedy for the springing re- 
volt in the Colonies would be found when the 
Americans were " reduced to obedience," an 
obedience " secured by stricter laws and 
stronger obligations." 

I honor your son as I honor your great- 
grandfather, not merely because he had the 
courage to offer his life in the service of a 
world-wide liberty, but no less because in a 
time of great perplexity he had the clearness 
of vision to perceive in which direction the 
path of duty lies. 

Your father, I remember, was wounded at 



Perplexities 7 

Gettysburg and never wholly recovered from 
the effects of his campaigning. He had in- 
herited from his grandfather the spirit of 
vision and courage. The issue in 1850 when 
the compromise measures were passed was 
complicated and perplexing — insoluble to 
one accustomed to judge the moral value of 
action by the probable consequences. Samuel 
J. Tilden was a man of high principle and re- 
markably clear political intelligence. Up to 
1850 he had been an anti-slavery man. He 
never became a pro-slavery man. But he 
foresaw that insistence on the Constitutional 
right of the Nation to prohibit the extension 
of slavery would inevitably bring on civil war, 
and he was sure that civil war would result 
either in a dissolution of the Union or in the 
government of a defeated South by a victor- 
ious North — a condition absolutely incom- 
patible with either true liberty or a true union 
of the States. Abraham Lincoln cut through 
all such arguments of philosophers who meas- 
ured moral principles by anticipated results. 
If, he said in his Cooper Union speech, slav- 
ery is right, we ought to do all that the South 
asks of us. If slavery is wrong, we have no 
right to fasten it upon territories for the gov- 
ernment of which we are responsible. I am 
quoting not his words, but interpreting his 
spirit. From that position he never for a 



8 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

moment wavered and in his second inaugural 
address repeated it in one of the most elo- 
quent sentences he ever uttered : "Fondly do 
we hope, fervently do we pray, that this 
mighty scourge of war may speedily pass 
away. Yet if God wills that it continue until 
all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two 
hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall 
be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn 
with the lash shall be paid by another drawn 
by the sword, as was said three thousand 
years ago, so still it must be said, that the 
judgments of the Lord are true and righteous 
altogether." 

I honor your boy as I honor your father 
and as I honor Abraham Lincoln, not merely 
because he has the courage of his convictions 
and has sought the privilege of offering his 
life for the life of the world, but because he 
sees so clearly that compromise with murder, 
robbery and rape would make the Nation ac- 
cessory in those crimes and that honor and 
humanity unite in demanding of the men of 
America that they enter this war. To have 
stayed out would have been to go down to 
history with the inscription of Ephraim on 
our tomb : 

The children of Ephraim, being armed and carrying 

bows, 
Turned back in the day of battle. 



Perplexities 9 

Whether your son comes back, or is 
brought back maimed, or is buried in an un- 
known grave in a foreign land, I congratulate 
you on having such a son with so clear a 
vision and so steady a heart. The remem- 
brance of a brave son is better than the com- 
panionship of a cowardly one. And I con- 
gratulate you that you have brought up your 
boy to be such a soldier in such a war as this. 
Louder than addresses, sermons, editorials, 
or Presidential messages are the actions of 
our brave young men summoning the Nation 
to its solemn duty : 

Be not deaf to the sound that warns, 
Be not gull'd by a despot's plea! 
Are figs of thistles ? or grapes of thorns ? 
How can a despot feel with the Free? 
Form, form, Riflemen, form! 
Riflemen, Riflemen, Riflemen, form! 

These lines were written by one of Eng- 
land's greatest poets. But it is greater to 
live poetry than to write it; the heroic life is 
more eloquent than the poet's summons to 
heroism. It is a cause for profound grati- 
tude that your heavenly Father has given you 
a son who could not be deceived by the pleas 
of a placid pacifism, who could not be per- 
suaded that to acquiesce in monstrous crime 
is to follow Jesus Christ. 



io The Twentieth Century Crusade 

As this war goes on and the American 
casualties increase, the tragedy of it will be 
more and more impressed upon us, and more 
and more we shall realize the meaning of 
Sherman's oft quoted sentence, " War is 
hell." Against the temptation to seek peace 
by compromise with wickedness which this 
tragedy will bring with it, we need to fortify 
ourselves by an unassailable conviction that 
there are experiences which, if permitted, 
would be worse than hell. If this were not 
so, a just God would never allow hell to exist. 
The Massacre of St. Bartholomew was worse 
than the war bravely fought by the Nether- 
landers to defend their country from Spanish 
despotism. The massacre of the unresist- 
ing Jews by the Russians was worse than the 
Russo-Japanese War. The massacre of the 
unresisting Armenians by the Turks was 
worse than the Crimean War. Crime un- 
punished, unrestrained, unprevented; crim- 
inals uncured; greed, cruelty, malice, allowed 
to riot unchecked ; purity and innocence unpro- 
tected from rapacity and lust: these are infi- 
nitely worse than the hell which Jonathan 
Edwards, Milton, and Dante portrayed. 
Your son has joined the noble army of patri- 
ots who in all epochs have been found ready 
to give their lives in the age-long campaign 



Perplexities 1 1 

between right and wrong, as Jesus Christ 
gave his life, for the salvation of their fellow 
men. 



SECOND LETTER 

THE BATTLE OF LIFE 

You are proud of your son; his loyalty, his 
courage, his self-sacrifice. Your instinct ap- 
plauds him and yet — you are perplexed. 
You have read that war " is only splendid 
murder " ; that " there never was a good war 
or a bad peace " ; that " peace is the happy 
state of man, war his corruption, his dis- 
grace " ; that " war is wholly contrary to the 
spirit of Jesus " ; and these and kindred sen- 
tences you have heard from the pulpit, and 
read in books, one of which was written for 
the very purpose of justifying America's part 
in this war. No wonder you are perplexed. 
No wonder that your conscience demands a 
clear and definite answer to the question, Has 
your son done right in entering this war? or 
are his instincts and your instincts a survival 
of a savagery which Christianity has not yet 
entirely conquered? 

The question, Is war right or wrong, is 
like the question, Was the crucifixion the 
greatest crime or the greatest glory of human 

12 



The Battle of Life 13 

history? The crucifixion inflicted by Judas, 
Caiaphas and Pilate was an infamous crime; 
the crucifixion endured by Jesus Christ was 
a divine glory. The battlefield in Europe is 
to-day the scene of the greatest crime the 
world has ever known; and the scene of the 
world's greatest glory. On the lurid sky 
above that field the flaming sword of Prussia 
writes where all the world may see it, " Self- 
will when it has conceived bringeth forth sin, 
and sin when it is finished bringeth forth 
death," and by its side the swords of Belgium 
offering herself a sacrifice to save France, of 
England coming to the rescue of both, and of 
America crossing the sea to aid the three are 
writing in letters of celestial light, " Without 
the shedding of blood there is no remission of 
sin." This is what I wish to make clear to 
you in this and the following letter. 

We are accustomed to think that peace is 
the normal condition of life; that conflicts, 
struggles, wars are regrettable episodes. In 
fact conflict is the normal condition of life, 
and times of peace are simply preparations 
for a renewed conflict, as sleep is simply a 
preparation for renewed activity in the morn- 
ing. The best wish we can have for our chil- 
dren is that they may so live that looking back 
over their life they can say, " I have fought 
a good fight." 



14 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

We are all born on a field of battle. Life 
and Death warred against each other in the 
mother who gave us birth and who went down 
to that door which is both entrance and exit, 
not knowing whether she would go out into 
the light or whether out of the darkness a new 
life would be given into her keeping. For 
every true mother is a heroine, who in the 
very beginning of motherhood lays down her 
life for her child. 

In the cradle our battle begins. In every 
one of us are microbes of life and microbes 
of disease. They are lined up against each 
other and no one can tell when active battle 
may break out between them. When the 
healthy microbes are in the mastery we are 
well, when they are attacked we are sick, 
when they are defeated we are in peril of our 
lives. When we are sick we call a doctor; 
but all that the doctor can do is to reenforce 
the healthy microbes. He and his medicines 
are but the reserve which every competent 
general keeps ready for the critical hour in 
battle. 

We need for our life food, clothing, 
shelter. These are not given, they are 
won by struggle. Douglass Jerold said, 
" Tickle the earth with a hoe and she 
laughs with a harvest"; but any one who 
has tickled the cornfield with a hoe on a 



The Battle of Life 15 

hot August afternoon knows that it is no 
laughing matter for him then, whatever it 
may prove to be in the harvest afterward. 
Nature gives us nothing that we do not earn 
by our labors. We wrest our supplies from 
her; our food, our shelter, our clothing are 
the spoils of battle. We pray for bread, and 
God gives us a prairie; for clothing, and he 
gives us wild beasts which we may hunt, or 
sheep which we may tend, or cotton fields 
which we may cultivate; for shelter, and he 
gives us trees which the woodsman's ax must 
fell The comforts of civilization are fruits 
of victory, crowning a patient, persistent 
struggle to overcome insistent and continued 
hostile forces. 

As our physical life and the supplies which 
are essential to it are the fruit of warfare, so 
is our education. We hear of self-educated 
men. All educated men are self-educated. 
The mind is not a vessel into which the 
teacher pours learning as the milkman pours 
milk into the bottle we have left at our door. 
The mind is a seed bed and the teacher a sun 
who bids the seed come forth. But if the 
seed does not burst its prison walls, the sun 
shines upon the earth in vain. The office 
of the school and college is not to think for 
their pupils, but to furnish them with the 
ability to do their own thinking. The object 



1 6 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

of education is to give the pupil power, and 
power comes only by struggle. A man can 
no more become a scholar by accepting other 
men's thought than he can become an athlete 
by looking on while other men exercise. 

This is the test by which we can distinguish 
between a real and a sham education. Sham 
education gives learning; real education gives 
wisdom. What is the difference? This. 
You can speak of a learned fool, but you 
cannot speak of a wise fool. Sham educa- 
tion puts learning on the student; real edu- 
cation puts power in the student. The one 
student is a parrot who repeats what he has 
learned. The other student is a man who 
says what he has thought. The teacher who 
asks his pupils to recite correctly what the 
text book has told them, the minister who 
asks his congregation to believe the doctrine 
which his sermon contains because his sermon 
contains it, the church which asks its mem- 
bership to affirm the creed which the church 
has framed for them, are not equipping men 
for life. Equipment for life comes only by 
living. It is only when the pupil has wrestled 
with the problems of his text book and the 
hearer with the theology of his preacher and 
the member with the creed of his church, that 
they possess either wisdom or intelligent 
piety. Wisdom is not minted and put into 



The Battle of Life 17 

circulation for us. We must mine it our- 
selves. " If thou search for her as for hid- 
den treasures," said the wise man. He was 
a wise man and in so far as certain schemes of 
education are based upon a notion that wis- 
dom can be given without compelling the stu- 
dent to search for it, such schemes are the 
reverse of wise. 

As health and wisdom, so character can be 
won only on the battlefield. The mother 
who wishes to keep her child innocent is pre- 
paring her child for failure and herself for 
disappointment. Life conducts the child 
from the innocence of babyhood through the 
struggles of experience to the virtue of man- 
hood and womanhood. The apostle thus de- 
scribes the building of character: "Giving 
all diligence, add to your faith valor; and to 
valor knowledge ; and to knowledge self-con- 
trol; and to self-control patience; and to pa- 
tience godliness; and to godliness brotherly 
kindness; and to brotherly kindness love." 

We cannot acquire valor without meeting 
danger. For valor is not the absence of fear, 
it is victory over fear. Marshal Ney, con- 
sulting with his staff on a knoll overlooking 
the battlefield, was addressed by one of the 
men with the sentence, " Marshal, see how 
your knees are trembling." " Yes," was his 
reply, " and they would tremble more if they 



1 8 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

knew where in a few moments I am going to 
take them." Not carelessness of danger, but 
this realization of danger and sturdy resolve 
to meet it is valor. We cannot acquire self- 
control without a battle between the higher 
and the lower self, between the spirit and the 
flesh. Temperance is not absence of ap- 
petites and passions. God has endowed us 
with appetites and passions, and they are nec- 
essary for our existence. Temperance is self- 
mastery, the control of the appetites and pas- 
sions by the reason, the conscience and the 
will. We cannot acquire patience without 
bearing burdens and burdens that are hard 
to be borne. To be thick-skinned is not to be 
patient. The rhinoceros is not a patient 
beast. The Greek word rendered patience 
means etymologically, to remain under, or 
waiting for, as a pastor remains under a bur- 
den or a soldier awaits an expected assault. 
Patience remains under the burden or calmly 
awaits threatening peril from which im- 
patience strives to escape. We cannot ac- 
quire godliness without spiritual struggle. 
Walking humbly with God is possible only 
to him who has learned how to look upon 
the things that are invisible and are eter- 
nal, and we look upon the things that are in- 
visible and eternal only by pushing our^ way 
through the veil of sense toward the invisible 



The Battle of Life 19 

reality. This even with the most saintly and 
self-denying involves a life-long struggle. No 
saint in the calendar of the church better de- 
served canonization than Dr. Edward Living- 
ston Trudeau, and at the close of his auto- 
biography he sums up his life as " full of the 
aspirations and ceaseless strivings of the 
spirit for expression in worship, ever groping 
to know God and ever sustained by too 
swiftly fading glimpses of the Heavenly 
vision. " 

We are all emerging from the animal con- 
dition. Whether the race has been de- 
veloped from a lower race or not, biology has 
made it indisputably clear that every indi- 
vidual has passed through a lower animal 
condition before he came forth a full-formed 
man child. We all have something of the 
animal in us. Every one of us is a zoological 
garden. Nor can we get rid of the animal; 
it is an essential part of our earthly life. 
How to domesticate the animal, how to make 
it our servant, not our master, this is the 
individual problem of every human soul. 
There is no one so saintly that he has not at 
times a struggle in order to realize his ideal, 
and there is no one so blind to spiritual values 
that his conscience does not sometimes rebuke 
him for shameful thoughts or deeds, or his 
faith sometimes put before him a higher ideal 



20 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

than he has ever attained and inspire within 
him an aspiration to do better and to be bet- 
ter. There is no one of us whose soul does 
not sometimes respond to Tennyson's prayer : 

" Oh, for a man to rise in me, 

That the man that I am may cease to be." 

Paul has put this eternal conflict between the 
flesh and the spirit very clearly in his letters, 
nowhere more clearly than in his letter to the 
Galatians : 

For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, <uid the 
Spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary the 
one to the other; that ye may not do the things 
that ye would. . . . Now the works of the flesh 
are manifest, which are these: fornication, unclean- 
ness, lasciviousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, 
strife, jealousies, wraths, factions, divisions, parties, 
envyings, drunkenness, revelings, and such like; of 
which I forewarn you, even as I did forewarn 
you, that they who practise such things shall not 
inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the 
Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsufrering, kindness, 
goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control ; against 
such there is no law. 

This battle between Good and Evil is not 
only an individual battle; the battle is not 
only in the soul of the individual. The 
forces of Good and the forces of Evil are 



The Battle gj Life 21 

organized and the war is carried on upon an 
awful scale in the history of the human race. 
In life are two armies confronting each other. 
On the one side are the organized forces for 
virtue: the home, the school, the reform or- 
ganizations, the philanthropic societies and 
the church. On the other side are the or- 
ganized forces for Evil: the houses of prosti- 
tution, the gambling hells, the liquor shops 
and the vices which they represent, embodied 
in forms sometimes masquerading in the 
habiliments of virtue — in reputable society 
inciting the animal passions, in reputable 
banquets stimulating gluttony and drunken- 
ness. Not least among the organized forces 
for good is the State. It is a self-protective 
society. Its function is to protect the indi- 
vidual not only against crimes of violence but 
also against the more seductive enticements 
of organized vice. 

But there are times when these forces for 
virtue become corrupted or controlled by the 
spirit of Evil — the church becomes an in- 
strument of superstition, the State an instru- 
ment of oppression. Then it becomes the 
duty of those who have consecrated them- 
selves to the cause of righteousness to do 
battle against the church and the State be- 



22 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

cause they have become the weapons of false- 
hood and injustice. One phase of this truth 
is stated with great clearness in ou~ American 
Declaration of Independence : 

We hold these truths to be self-evident — that 
all men are created equal; that they are endowed 
by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; 
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness. That to secure these rights, governments 
are instituted among men, deriving their just powers 
from the consent of the governed; that whenever 
any form of government becomes destructive of these 
ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abol- 
ish it, and to institute a new government, laying its 
foundation on such principles, and organizing its 
powers in such form, as to them shall seem most 
likely to effect their safety and happiness. 

Such was the case in the sixteenth century 
when Philip II and his henchman the Duke 
of Alva attempted to force upon the north of 
Europe the Spanish Inquisition, and William 
of Orange by his vision and his courage saved 
the Netherlands from becoming a second 
Spain. Such was the condition in the seven- 
teenth century when Charles I attempted to 
force upon England an absolutism like that 
of the Bourbon kings which throttled France, 
and Oliver Cromwell and his Ironsides by 
their valor made England and all English 
lands forever safe for democracy. Such was 



The Battle of Life 23 

the condition when in 1776 George III of 
England, who had inherited from his German 
ancestry a German temperament and German 
autocratic principles, endeavored to govern 
the American colonies in the interest and for 
the benefit of England's feudal lords, and 
Washington and his compatriots by their 
swords made the colonies free and independ- 
ent States and " brought forth upon this con- 
tinent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and 
dedicated to the proposition that all men are 
created equal." 

When this condition arises, when the State 
or the church becomes an instrument of evil, 
he who has enlisted for life as a soldier for 
righteousness must either betray the cause to 
which he has dedicated himself, surrender to 
the powers of evil, and become a passive if 
not an active partner in their crimes, or he 
must give battle to them whatever may be the 
cost of that battle to himself and to those 
whom he loves. There is for him no other 
choice. If William of Orange and his com- 
patriots had submitted to the rule of Philip 
II, Northern Europe would have lapsed into 
the condition of Spain. If Cromwell and his 
compatriots had submitted to the rule of 
Charles I, England would have recovered 
her liberties, if at all, only by a revolution 
rivaling in its horrors that of France. If 



24 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

the colonies had submitted to George III, it 
may be doubted whether the British Empire 
would ever have been born, for England 
would not have learned the lesson that only 
just government is stable government and 
that just government is always administered 
for the benefit of the governed. 

That our boys in France are fighting in this 
age-long conflict, animated by the same spirit 
which animated William of Orange, Oliver 
Cromwell and George Washington, I shall 
attempt to show you in my next letter. 



THIRD LETTER 

THE PEACEMAKERS 

If you were living in a town in New Mex- 
ico and a gang of desperadoes from across 
the border were attacking a neighboring 
town, robbing the banks and stores, murder- 
ing the men, and preparing to carry away the 
young women to a fate worse than death, 
and a band of citizens was starting out from 
your town, rifle in hand to defend their neigh- 
bors, you would wish your son to join them 
though he did so at the peril of his life. This 
is what has taken place on an enormous scale 
on the other side of the sea. We speak of a 
war in Europe. In strictness of speech there 
is no war in Europe. There is an inter- 
national posse comitatus, representing more 
than twenty civilized nations, summoned to 
preserve the peace and protect the peaceable 
nations of Europe from the worst, most 
highly organized and most efficient band of 
brigands the modern world has ever known. 
This is not rhetoric. It is an accurate and 
scientific statement of the facts. 
25 



26 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

The classical definition of war is furnished 
by Charles Sumner in an address on the 
" Grandeur of Nations," delivered in Boston 
in 1845. It is based on authorities there by 
him cited, and has ever since been accepted 
as an authoritative definition : " War is a 
public armed conflict between nations, under 
the sanction of international law, to establish 
justice between them." 

There are two things necessary to make an 
armed conflict war. It must be for the pur- 
pose of determining a question of justice be- 
tween the warring parties, and it must be con- 
ducted under international kw.^ 

There is no question of justice at issue in 
Europe to-day. 

At the opening of the war, the German 
Prime Minister, Bethmann-Hollweg, in- 
formed the Reichstag that the German troops 
had occupied Luxemburg and perhaps had al- 
ready entered Belgian territory, the neutral- 
ity of both of which States Germany had her- 
self guaranteed, and he added, " The wrong 
— I speak openly — the wrong we thereby 
commit we will try to make good as soon as 
our military aims have been attained." And 
with that declaration before them the Ger- 
mans, through the Reichstag, endorsed the 
war and have ever since sustained it. In 
191 1, three years before that declaration 



The Peacemakers 27 

Hernhardi, one of the leaders of the military 
party in Germany, had declared that war is a 
biological, a moral and a Christian necessity 
" in which Might proves itself the supreme 
Right," and he added, " France must be so 
completely crushed that she can never again 
come across our path." That the German 
military party had been preparing Germany 
for this war for something like half a century 
is no longer questioned. That the Kaiser is 
personally responsible for bringing it on is no 
longer questionable. This conclusion no 
longer rests upon what the lawyers call cir- 
cumstantial evidence. It has been definitely 
affirmed by German witnesses of such unim- 
peachable authority as Prince Lichnowsky, 
who was the German Ambassador to Eng- 
land when the war was declared, and by Dr. 
Muhlon, a German citizen who at that time 
represented the German government in the 
directorate of the Krupps gun works. And 
the Kaiser's ambition was foreshadowed by 
him in a significant speech made in 1900 
on laying the foundation stone of a museum 
at Saalburg: "May our German Father- 
land," he said, " in the future, by the co- 
operation of princes and people, of armies 
and citizens, become sufficiently powerful and 
as strongly united, as extraordinary, as the 
universal Roman Empire, that at last in the 



28 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

future one may be able to say, as was said 
formerly Civis Romanus sum, I am a German 
citizen." 

The object of the German government, as 
avowed by its leaders, is not to determine a 
question of justice; it is to crush France, 
humiliate England, and bring the civilized 
world under the domination of the German 
sword. 

Nor is this war — I must call it war be- 
cause there is no other short word to use — 
conducted under the sanction of international 
law. 

Germany has openly, flagrantly, avowedly 
and with frankness declared that she does not 
recognize the laws of nations, nor the laws 
of war, nor the laws of humanity, nor the 
laws of God. Her motto is, " Necessity 
knows no law." 

At first I could not believe the reports of 
German atrocities in Belgium and France to 
be true. I thought them the exaggerations 
of newspaper reporters; then, the extravagant 
outbursts of individual soldiers in violation 
of law. But it is impossible any longer to 
believe this. Three separate commissions, 
the first appointed by Belgium, the second by 
France, the third by England, have investi- 
gated with scrupulous care and reported the 
facts with names, dates and places given in 



The Peacemakers 29 

detail and substantiated by affidavits. These 
reports have rendered skepticism any longer 
impossible except for those who think that 
ignorance is a virtue when knowledge is dis- 
tressing. Germany has been asked by Great 
Britain to unite with her in an investigation, 
and Germany, by refusing to share in such an 
investigation, has pleaded guilty to the 
charge. 

Nor is it any palliation of these crimes to 
say, as has been sometimes said, that they 
are incidents characteristic of war. This is 
not true. They are not characteristic of war. 
They are in violation of the laws of war. 

But that is not all. In our Civil War Mr. 
Lincoln appointed a commission to prepare 
rules of warfare to govern our army. The 
draft was prepared, it is interesting to re- 
call, by Francis Lieber, an American citi- 
zen of German birth. After the military offi- 
cials had approved these rules, Mr. Lincoln, 
if I may use a somewhat barbaric phrase, 
" Englished " them. Those rules of warfare 
prepared by our government under Lincoln's 
beneficent administration, became the basis 
of the rules of war accepted by the Hague 
Tribunal. One has only to compare these 
rules of war of America and of the Hague 
Tribunal with those officially recognized by 
the German War Book to see that Germany 



30 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

has officially put itself outside the pale of 
civilized nations. According to the rules of 
civilized warfare, war is conducted against 
the army of the enemy. According to the 
German War Book, it is conducted against 
the people of the country. According to the 
rules of civilized warfare, churches, hospitals, 
libraries, public buildings, are as far as pos- 
sible to be guarded from destruction. Ac- 
cording to the German War Book, they are 
to be destroyed. According to the laws of 
civilized warfare, the property of non-com- 
batants is to be regarded as sacred, unless 
military exigencies require its destruction. 
According to the German War Book, the 
property of non-combatants is to be destroyed 
for the purpose of producing terror. Ac- 
cording to the laws of civilized warfare, the 
captives taken in war may be used in peace- 
ful industries, but not for maintaining the 
armies or manufacturing the munitions toht 
used against their own kinsfolk. According 
to the German War Book, they may be so 
used. 

Not only have the laws of war and the 
laws of nations been ruthlessly set aside ; the 
crimes that have been committed by the Ger- 
man armies have been glorified by the Ger- 
man nation. The Germans have boasted of 
their booty; they have organized triumphal 



The Peacemakers 31 

processions, struck off medals, sung hymns of 
praise, preached sermons in pulpits and made 
addresses on platforms in praise of the men 
who have committed these unspeakable 
crimes. 

It is then not rhetoric, it is a simple, accu- 
rate, scientific statement of the fact to say that 
in Europe the Allies are fighting to protect 
lands of peaceable people from brigandry. 
What is brigandry? The definition in the 
Century dictionary has only five words. It is 
easily remembered: " Highway robbery by 
organized gangs." Was there ever highway 
robbery conducted on so enormous a scale by 
so ruthless and unscrupulous a gang as what 
Henry van Dyke has well called " the preda- 
tory Potsdam gang " ? 

The Archbishop of York has told us that 
we ought to offer for the Germans the prayer 
of Christ upon the Cross, " Father forgive 
them for they know not what they do." 
Christ offered that prayer for the soldiers 
who did not know what they did. To them 
Jesus was only a common criminal, con- 
demned both by the courts of his own coun- 
try and by the Roman courts. For them he 
asked his Father's forgiveness. But he did 
not ask his Father's forgiveness for Caiphas 
who declared, when he conspired Jesus' 
death, that it was better that an innocent 



32 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

man should die than that the Jewish rulers 
should lose their places. He did not ask it 
for Pilate who before delivering Jesus to the 
priests to be crucified declared " I find no 
crime in him." He did not ask it for Judas 
who confessed that he had betrayed innocent 
blood. They knew what they did. I will 
offer this prayer to my Father for those Ger- 
mans in the trenches who have been deluded 
or driven into this horrible warfare; but I 
will not offer it for the Kaiser or his accom- 
plices, for they do know what they are do- 
ing and deliberately conspired to do it. I 
may be tempted to lie to my fellow-men, but 
I will never lie to my God. 

The French greeted our boys on their ar- 
rival in France as " the Salvation Army." 
They were right. It is a salvation army. 
We are inspired by no territorial ambition. 
We want no more territory. We have been 
reluctant to take territory lying outside the 
continent of America even when it has been 
thrust upon us. We have no political ambi- 
tions. We have no desire to govern an alien 
people. The responsibility for the govern- 
ment of the Philippines we have temporarily 
assumed with great reluctance. We could 
not with honor escape it. For having de- 
stroyed the Spanish government, international 
law and national honor combined to require 



The Peacemakers 33 

us to maintain a provisional government in 
its place until the Filipinos were prepared to 
assume its responsibilities and exercise its 
duties themselves. We have no wish to dic- 
tate to any other peoples what their form of 
government shall be. We are equally ready 
to fellowship monarchial England and Re- 
publican France. We find it difficult to per- 
suade ourselves to interfere in order to pro- 
tect the Russian people from the anarchy 
which incompetence and treachery have com- 
bined to inflict upon them. We should never 
have desired to interfere with absolutism in 
Germany if Germany had not attempted to 
impose despotism by military power upon 
free peoples. 

But we cannot stand idly by while a 
great nation, which for half a century has 
been preparing for its crimes, enacts the 
part of a pirate on the sea and a brigand on 
the land, sinks peaceable merchant vessels 
without warning, destroys in mere wanton- 
ness churches, libraries, hospitals, enslaves 
unoffending men and rapes defenseless 
women. It is a disgrace to a noble profes- 
sion to call the German officers soldiers or 
the German forces an army. They are in 
the strictest and most scientific sense of that 
term brigands, for they constitute a highly 
organized gang engaged in highway robbery 



34 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

on an enormous scale. The armies of the 
Allies are in the strictest sense of that term 
" officers of the peace." They are " fighting 
for peace." They might well bear upon their 
banners the inscription, " Blessed are the 
peacemakers, for they shall be called the 
children of God." 

A friend has called my attention to the fact 
that over thirty-six years ago Phillips Brooks 
preached a sermon on the curse of Meroz, to 
be found in the Book of Judges, 

" Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, 
Curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; 
Because they come not to the help of the 

Lord, 
To the help of the Lord against the 

mighty." 

From that sermon I reprint this extract: 

Meroz is gone. No record of it except this verse 
remains. The most ingenious and indefatigable ex- 
plorer cannot even guess where it once stood. But 
the curse remains; the violent outburst of the con- 
tempt and anger which men feel who have fought 
and suffered and agonized, and then see other men 
who have the same interest in the result which they 
have, coming out cool and unwounded from their 
safe hiding-places to take a part of the victory which 
they have done nothing to secure. . . . The sin for 
which Meroz is cursed is pure inaction. We hear 



The Peacemakers 35 

so much about the danger of wrong thinking and 
the danger of wrongdoing. There is the other 
danger, of not doing right and not thinking right, 
of not duing and not thinking at all. It is hard 
for many people to feel that there is danger and harm 
in that, the worst of harm and danger. And the 
trouble comes, I think, from the low condition of 
spiritual vitality, from the lack of emphasis and 
vigor in the whole conception of a man's own life. 

Thank God that America is saved from the 
sin of Meroz. Thank God that you and 
your son were never even tempted in this 
hour of trial to the sin of indifference and in- 
action. 

That in this hour of world peril the dis- 
ciples of Jesus Christ are definitely called to 
service by the explicit and unambiguous com- 
mission of their Master, I shall endeavor to 
show you in my next letter. 



FOURTH LETTER 

THE OLD GOSPEL 

You told me once that your minister said 
sometime before America entered the war — 
or was it some other minister in your Church? 
I am not sure — that after serious reflec- 
tion he had determined that in his preach- 
ing he would make no reference to the war ; 
he would confine himself to the Old Gospel. 
A Christian friend of mine not long since 
said to me that he thought this war was just 
and necessary, and he was glad that America 
had entered into it; but that he could not rec- 
oncile war with the teachings of Jesus Christ 
and thought that we must be content to lay 
Christianity, as Christianity, aside until the 
war is over. Others in defending the action 
of Christ's followers in entering the war, 
have said that Christ in his teaching presents 
an ideal which cannot now be put in practice ; 
he gives us not a chart to guide us in our 
voyage, but a picture of the land to which 
we are voyaging. Others have contended 
that this war, fought at such cost of life, more 
than eighteen centuries after Christ's birth, 
36 



The Old Gospel 37 

proves that Christianity is a failure ; and still- 
others that Christianity cannot be a failure 
because it has not yet been tried. In this 
letter I desire to explain to you the ground of 
my faith that Jesus Christ calls his followers 
to the colors and that their response to the 
call constitutes a triumph for Christianity 
such as the world has never before known. 

The ancient Hebrews called themselves a 
peculiar people. One of their peculiarities 
was that they looked forward, not backward, 
for their Golden Age. They believed that a 
time was coming when poverty would be 
abolished, when property would be so equally 
distributed that every man could sit under his 
own vine and fig tree, when education would 
be universal so that no man would need to 
teach his neighbor, when despotism would 
cease because the laws of God would be ac- 
cepted by mankind and just law would need 
no other enforcement than the sanctions of 
religion, when wars would end and the imple- 
ments of war would be converted into instru- 
ments of industry, when family dissensions 
would cease and the hearts of the fathers 
would be turned to the children and the hearts 
of the children would be turned to the fathers. 

The theme of Jesus' ministry was this king- 
dom of God. In his first published sermon, 



38 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

delivered in the synagogue at Nazareth, he 
read one of the ancient prophecies of this 
Golden Age, and told the congregation he 
had come to fulfill it. At the end of his life, 
in the trial before Caiaphas, he was put upon 
the stand; in violation of the Jewish law the 
oath was administered to him; and under the 
solemn sanction of that oath he reaffirmed 
his mission, and in a different form repeated 
that affirmation in the subsequent trial before 
Pilate. 

In the fulfillment of that mission Jesus 
never set aside the social teachings of the 
prophets or substituted for their glad tidings 
of a Golden Age any other. On the con- 
trary, he emphasized their social teachings. 
They had denounced injustice and inhuman- 
ity and repeatedly declared that no forms or 
ceremonies could take the place of doing justly 
and loving mercy. Jesus denounced injustice 
and inhumanity with even greater vigor, and 
reaffirmed the truth that righteousness and 
mercy are greater than temple services. And 
he taught his disciples to pray, " Thy kingdom 
come; Thy will be done; on earth as it is in 
heaven." 

But in emphasizing the teachings of the 
prophets he cleared away misapprehensions 
which had grown up about those teachings 
and obscured their real meaning. 



The Old Gospel 39 

Early in his ministry he called twelve 
friends about him to be his companions, to 
learn his principles, imbibe his spirit, and 
proclaim to others the glad tidings which they 
had received from him. On the occasion 
of their consecration to this ministry, he 
preached what is popularly known as The 
Sermon on the Mount, though never so 
entitled in the New Testament. In this ser- 
mon he described certain essential principles 
of the life which he had come to inspire in 
humanity. He told the people that happi- 
ness cannot be conferred, for the secret of 
happiness is character; that there can be no 
kingdom of God in society unless there is a 
kingdom of God in the individual life; and 
that obedience in action to the divine law is 
not enough, that their righteousness must 
exceed that of the Pharisees who were 
scrupulous observers of the law; that the 
kingdom of God requires unity of the human 
spirit with the divine spirit; and that the life 
which unites the Father with his children is 
freely given by the Father to his children if 
they will seek it from him. Thus the Sermon 
on the Mount interprets the declaration of 
the psalmist : " I delight to do thy will, O 
my God; yea, thy law is within my heart.'' 
Jesus did not substitute an individual gospel 
for a social gospel, but he taught that there 



40 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

could be no social gospel without an individual 
gospel. A brave army cannot be composed 
of cowardly soldiers, nor a learned school of 
dunces, nor can a loving and loyal family of 
the heavenly Father be composed of disloyal 
and quarreling children. 

The Jews believed that this kingdom would 
be given to them as the favored people of 
Jehovah. Jesus told his disciples that it 
would not be given by God to man, but must 
be wrought by men in a spirit of loyalty to 
God. In one of his sermons, several times 
repeated in different forms, he compared God 
to an absentee landlord and the world to an 
estate which the landlord has left for his serv- 
ants to administer. The Jews believed that 
the kingdom would suddenly and by a 
miraculous display of divine power be be- 
stowed. Jesus in a series of parables told 
his disciples that the kingdom of God was 
like a seed growing secretly, no one knows 
how; that its growth was dependent upon the 
soil in which it was planted — that it would 
thrive in some communities better than in 
others and in some communities not at all; 
that evil would grow as well as good, and that 
they must never be discouraged because they 
saw the growth of evil; that the kingdom 
would grow only by agitation against hos- 
tility, inertia, and indifference — like a little 



The Old Gospel 41 

yeast in a great lump of dough; that it would 
be won by his disciples at a great cost, like a 
treasure hidden in a field or a pearl found in 
the market-place, to acquire which the pur- 
chaser has to sell all that he has; and again 
and again he told his disciples that to acquire 
this kingdom they must be ready to give up 
houses, lands, reputation, peace, life itself. 

The contrast between the kingdom of God 
and the kingdom of this world he made very 
clear in a passage which furnishes, I think, 
both the briefest and the most lucid definition 
of the difference between Christianity and 
paganism to be found anywhere in literature. 
It is as follows : 

Ye know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it 
over them, and their great ones exercise authority 
over them. Not so shall it be among you : but who- 
soever would become great among you shall be your 
minister; and whosoever would be first among you 
shall be your servant : even as the Son of man came 
not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to 
give his life a ransom for many. 

Whether a community is pagan or Chris- 
tian does not depend upon its theological 
creed, its church organizations, its forms of 
worship, or even the name it gives to its God. 
It does not depend upon the question whether 
the people correctly define the relation of 
Jesus of Nazareth to God on the one hand 



42 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

and humanity on the other; whether they 
worship in a temple, in a meeting-house, or in 
the woods; whether they use an elaborate 
ritual or none at all; whether they call the ob- 
ject of their worship Odin, or Buddha, or Al- 
lah, or Jehovah. It depends on the question 
whether their idea of God is an almighty 
power which they fear, or an inexorable law 
to which they reluctantly submit, or a serene 
indifference to the pains and pleasures of life 
which they admire, or an infinite love which 
lives for and suffers with the loved one. For 
he who worships the Deity because he is the 
All Mighty worships Odin; he who worships 
a Deity who looks upon the struggles and the 
sorrows of his children with a serene indiffer- 
ence worships Buddha; he who worships a 
Lawgiver, who only wishes from his obedient 
subjects their submission to his rule worships 
Allah; only he who believes that the All- 
Father lives with his children, bears with 
them in their struggles and their sorrows, and 
seeks to save them from their sins, worships 
the God of the Bible, the God of Isaiah and 
of John. Whether a community is Christian 
or not depends on whether their religion ter- 
rifies or rules or meditates or serves. Any 
community in which the weak serve the 
strong, the poor serve the rich, the ignorant 
serve the wise, the many serve the few, is in 



The Old Gospel 43 

so far a pagan community. Any community 
in which the strong serve the weak, the wise 
serve the ignorant, the rich serve the poor, 
the few serve the many is in so far a Christian 
community. 

What Jesus meant by service he made 
clear by his teaching. He illustrated it by 
his story of the heretical Samaritan going to 
the succor of the wounded traveler in con- 
trast with a priest and a Levite hurrying to 
the church service; by his story of the rich 
man whom he sent to hell, not for any wrong 
inflicted upon Lazarus, but for saying to him- 
self, " The sufferings of the beggar at the 
door do not concern me," and leaving the 
beggar unrelieved; by his picture of the Last 
Judgment in which those were welcomed to 
the mansion of their heavenly Father who 
had fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty, 
clothed the stranger, and visited the sick. 
The fact that they did not know that Jesus 
was the Messiah and that they were render- 
ing service to him did not affect the divine 
judgment. 

Still more clearly Jesus illustrated by his 
own life what he meant by service. He gave 
himself unreservedly to making the world he 
lived in a better and a happier world. Were 
men hungry he fed them, were they ignorant 
he taught them, were they in sorrow he com- 



44 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

forted them, were they in despair he brought 
hope to them, were they the victims of wrong- 
doing he denounced their oppressors, and in 
two instances at the hazard of his life he 
came to the rescue of the defenseless. 

How can any man to-day preach the Old 
Gospel and ignore the present war ? 

The Master has made his mission very 
clear. " The Spirit of the Lord is upon me," 
he said, " because he anointed me to preach 
good tidings to the poor : he hath sent me to 
proclaim release to the captives, and recover- 
ing of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them 
that are bruised." Dying, he transmitted to 
his disciples this mission. u As the Father 
hath sent me, even so send I you," were al- 
most his last words to them. 

A band of robbers has invaded Belgium 
and France and stolen coal and iron from 
the mines, crops from the fields, money from 
the banks, pictures, statuary, and jewels from 
the homes, and what it could not steal it has 
wantonly destroyed. We have power to 
drive the robbers off. How can we preach 
glad tidings to the poor if we play the part of 
Dives and the woes of Lazarus do not con- 
cern us? This band of robbers has enslaved 
men and women by the thousand and set them 
to work raising food to feed their enemies 
and making munitions to enable their enemies 



The Old Gospel 45 

to continue the work of devastation. How 
can we preach deliverance to these captives 
and remain at home complacent in our own 
prosperity? This band has used its scientific 
knowledge in the manufacture of poisonous 
gases to destroy the eyes of thousands of its 
fellow-men. How can we allow that process 
to go on and pretend to fulfill our divine mis- 
sion to give sight to the blind? The imperial 
leader of this band has avowed his purpose to 
establish a Roman Empire in Europe, and the 
intellectual leaders of this band have poisoned 
the minds of the people with the doctrine that 
" Might makes Right," that the strong owe 
no duty to the weak — the sooner they die, 
the better — and some of them have declared 
that Odin, the god of force, is greater than 
Jehovah, the God of love. How can we pre- 
tend to set at liberty them that are sorely 
bruised by these oppressors if we are deaf to 
the cries of the Armenians, the Serbians, the 
Poles, and the Belgians? The minister who 
is indifferent to this war is either ignorant of 
or indifferent to the call of his Master. He 
does not preach the Old Gospel — the Gospel 
which Paul summed up in the sentence, " God 
w r as in Christ, reconciling the world unto him- 
self " — the world, not some men from the 
world. Fie came not to rescue a few favored 
ones from a sinking ship, not to graduate 



46 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

a few choice scholars from a mass left in igno- 
rance, not to save a few saints from a lost 
world : but to show the mariners how to bring 
the ship and all its passengers safe into the 
harbor, the teachers how to instruct all the 
pupils in the laws of God, and to reconcile 
the world to God by making it a world in- 
spired by God with the spirit of love, service, 
and sacrifice. 

I do not forget that there are those who 
honestly think that Jesus Christ forbade all 
use of physical force in resisting the powers 
of evil. Tolstoi, from the command " Judge 
not," concludes that all courts should be abol- 
ished; from " Resist not evil," that all police 
should be abolished; from " Lay not up for 
yourselves treasures on earth," that all saving 
and all thrift is wrong; from " Give to him 
that asketh of thee," that begging ought to be 
encouraged. But he is the only consistent 
literalist I have ever met with either in litera- 
ture or in life. 

The early disciples did not so understand 
their Master. Matthew reports him as say- 
ing " Think not that I came to send peace on 
the earth: I came not to send peace but a 
sword." Paul declares that the magistrate 
" beareth not the sword in vain : for he is a 
minister of God, an avenger for wrath to him 
that doeth evil." The author of the Epistle 



The Old Gospel 47 

to the Hebrews glories in the faith of those 
who by their faith " from weakness were 
made strong, waxed mighty in war, turned to 
flight armies of aliens "; John sees his Mas- 
ter as a knight errant on a white horse going 
forth " conquering and to conquer "; and the 
historians tell us that one reason why Con- 
stantine adopted Christianity as the religion 
of Rome was because he found that the Chris- 
tians made better soldiers than the pagans. 
Robert Louis Stevenson's interpretation of 
Christ's teaching is far more rational than 
Tolstoi's. " In our own person and fortune 
we should be ready to accept and pardon all; 
it is our cheek we are to turn, our coat that 
we are to give away to the man who has taken 
our cloak. But when another's face is buf- 
feted, perhaps a little of the lion will be- 
come us best. That we are to suffer others 
to be injured and stand by, is not conceivable 
and surely not desirable." 

This interpretation tallies with the spirit 
of Christ's teaching. Can anyone believe 
that if the Good Samaritan had appeared 
upon the scene when the robbers were engaged 
in beating the defenseless traveler and had 
passed by with the priest and Levite the world 
would by universal consent have given him 
the title of Good Samaritan? Can anyone 
believe that if the roughs and toughs of the 



48 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

city had beaten Lazarus at the rich man's 
door and the rich man, with servants able to 
furnish protection, had not interfered, Christ 
would have sent the rich man to Abraham's 
bosom? Can anyone believe that He who 
pronounced accursed of God, doomed to be 
destroyed by the fire prepared for the devil 
and his angels, those who had simply neg- 
lected the poor, the sick and the imprisoned, 
would welcome to the kingdom prepared for 
them from the foundation of the world those 
who had the power to give succor and had 
stood by idle and indifferent while a brutal 
gang was impoverishing, enslaving, and mur- 
dering hundreds of thousands of their peace- 
able and unoffending fellow-men? 

The example of Christ interprets his teach- 
ing and it gives no warrant to the pacifism 
of Tolstoi. At the beginning of Christ's life, 
he drove from the Temple a corrupt ring of 
thieves, pouring out the changers' money and 
overthrowing their tables. At the end of his 
life he put himself between the Temple police 
and his half awakened and defenseless disci- 
ples, stood guard while the police fell back- 
ward to the ground — were floored as we 
should say — and not till his disciples, taking 
his hint, " let them go their way," had es- 
caped, did he deliver himself up to his 
enemies. He saved others, himself he would 



The Old Gospel 49 

not save. He forbade Peter's futile resist- 
ance to the guard because it was futile and 
because he would not live under the protection 
of a government and at the same time resist 
the officers appointed to execute its laws. He 
was no I. W. W. Peter had neither the 
power nor the authority to protect his Master. 
But Pilate had both the power and the au- 
thority and because he was a pacifist and did 
not use his power, he has always and justly 
been accounted a partner in the crime of 
Caiaphas and Judas. For power always 
carries with it responsibility. 

I cannot understand those who think that 
Christianity has failed. These strangely 
blind skeptics can see the pitiless German 
horde raping, robbing, murdering, but they 
cannot see the followers of Christ carrying, 
at the cost of their own lives, his message of 
succor to the poor, the captives, the blinded, 
and those that are bruised by oppression. 
They can see the priests confessing their 
travesty of faith in the sentence, " He trusted 
on God; let him deliver him now, if he desir- 
eth him " ; but they cannot see the crucified 
Christ conquering the world by self-sacrifice. 

I think Christianity has never been so 
triumphant as it is to-day. But my grounds 
for this faith I must leave to be stated in my 
next letter. 



FIFTH LETTER 

" WE GLORY IN TRIBULATIONS " 

You ask me why God permits war. If he 
is in truth a heavenly father, why does he 
allow his children to fight and kill each other? 
Why does he not interfere to prevent this un- 
told suffering? 

The question why a God of love permits 
sin and suffering in the world, is one which 
many have asked of others and many more 
probably of themselves, in all ages of the 
world. It has caused many honest students 
of life to abandon their faith in the goodness 
of God as unreasonable, or at least to give up 
all attempt to frame any conception of God 
or to enter into any personal relations with 
him. It is this question which Job's friends 
put to him and he could not answer; all he 
could say was that his suffering was not a 
punishment for his sins for he had not com- 
mitted sins which would deserve such a pun- 
ishment. It is implied in the experiences of 
the Old Testament prophets and poets in 
such phrases as " Be not thou far off, O 
50 



" We Glory in Tribulations " 51 

Jehovah : thou my succor, haste thee to help 
me." "How long, O Jehovah? wilt thou 
forget me forever? " " How long wilt thou 
hide thy face from me?" "Why standest 
thou afar off, O Jehovah? Why hidest thou 
thyself in times of trouble? " " O Jehovah 
God of Hosts, how long wilt thou be angry 
against the prayer of thy people ? Thou hast 
fed them with the bread of tears, And given 
them tears to drink in large measure." 
" How long shall the wicked triumph? " 

To this question I can give no answer. I 
have no faith in what the theologians call 
theodicy — the attempt by scholars to justify 
the ways of God to man. This world is but 
a grain of sand in an infinite universe, and 
you and I but midgets on this grain of sand. 
To suppose that we can comprehend and in- 
terpret the plans and methods of the Eternal 
appears to me much more preposterous than 
to suppose that a child two years old can com- 
prehend and interpret the plans and methods 
of a Lincoln, a Gladstone or a Cavour. I 
rest content with the answer of Jesus Christ 
to the perplexity of his disciples: " What I 
do thou knowest not now ; but thou shalt un- 
derstand hereafter." 

But I can see that God is doing something 
for us that is much better than stopping the 
war; he is inspiring us with courage to win it. 



52 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

Happiness is not the end of life. Happi- 
ness is not the greatest gift love has to be- 
stow. Happiness is not the gift which we 
chiefly desire either for ourselves or our loved 
ones. What is the end of life? It is diffi- 
cult to find any one word which will express 
it. Character, wisdom, righteousness, educa- 
tion, human development, progress, growth, 
greatness of heart and greatness of mind are 
some of the phrases which have been em- 
ployed. The word I like best is the one 
which is most frequent in the New Testament : 
Life, 

Life is the object of life — every day a 
larger life than the day before. This is 
Christ's word : " I am come that they might 
have life, and that they might have it more 
abundantly." " I give unto them eternal 
life." That he might bring this gift of life 
to men, Jesus Christ came into the world: 
" The grace of God that bringeth salvation 
hath appeared to all men . . . teaching us 
that we should live" This is the object of 
the Bible. Scripture is given " that the man 
of God may be perfect." This is the object 
of the Church ! He gave apostles, prophets, 
evangelists, pastors and teachers, that we 
might come " unto a full-grown man, unto the 
measure of the stature of the fullness of 
Christ." Buddhism regards life as an evil: 



" We Glory in Tribulations " 53 

heaven is Nirvana, escape from life, uncon- 
scious existence. Christianity regards life as 
the greatest gift which a God of love can be- 
stow upon his children. Hell is Eternal 
Death; Heaven is Eternal Life. 

Is not life what we all want for ourselves 
and for our children? Coningsby Dawson 
writes home from the ship that is carrying 
him to France : " In seventeen days the boys 
will also have left you — so this will arrive 
when you're horribly lonely. I am so sorry 
for you dear people — but I'd be sorrier for 
you if we were all with you. If I were a 
father or mother I'd rather have my sons 
dead than see them failing when the supreme 
sacrifice was called for." 

Does not that appeal to all of us ? Would 
you not rather have the sacred memory of a 
brave son than the shameful presence of a 
cowardly one? Would you not rather see 
him suffering for his heroism than happy in 
his flight from peril ? Nay ! Would not his 
happiness in his shame add to your sorrow? 

In June, 19 17, Hermann Hagedorn read 
before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta 
Kappa an " Ode of Dedication," from which 
I take these two verses : 

Who said, "It is a booth where doves are sold"? 
Who said, "It is a money-changers' cave"? 



54 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

Silence to such forever, and behold ! 

It is a vast cathedral, and its nave 
And dim-lit transept and broad aisles are filled 

With a great nation's millions, on their knees 
With new devotion and high fervor thrilled 

Offering silver and heart's-ease 
And love and life and all sweet, temporal things, 

Still to keep bright 

The steady light 
That stifles in the wake of kings! 

A market-place! they cried? 

A lotus-land! They lied J 
It is a great cathedral, not with hands 
Upraised, but by the spirit's mute commands 
Uplifted by the spirit, wall and spire, 
To house a nation's purified desire! 
A church! Where in hushed fervor stand 

The children of contending races, 
Forgetting feud and fatherland — 

A hundred million lifted faces. 

Is it not worth all that it costs us to have 
America changed from a " money-changers' 
cave " to a " great cathedral "? Have you 
not reason to exult that your boy has helped 
directly and you and your husband scarcely 
less directly by the life you have nurtured in 
him, to bring about this rehabilitation of the 
nation? 

For it cannot be doubted that Americans 



" We Glory in Tribulations " 55 

were growing soft, easy, adipose. Our pros- 
perity was poisoning us. We were fast as- 
suming the fatal falsehood that happiness is 
the end of life. Our current phrases, " A 
happy New Year," " Many happy returns of 
the day, u A long and happy life to you," 
were conventional, but they expressed what 
was becoming a dominant desire for ourselves 
and for our friends. " Safety first " gen- 
erally meant comfort first. Much of the in- 
dustrial unrest was the struggle of pigs at the 
trough over the division of the swill. The 
ministers were hard put to it to reconcile the 
inequalities and unhappinesses of life with 
faith in a just and benevolent God. Glory 
in tribulation was becoming a lost art. 

The war is teaching us that happiness is not 
the end of life; that the joy of self-sacrifice 
is greater than the joy of self-indulgence. 
This we are learning as such a lesson only 
can be learned, not from sermons or text 
books, but in the school of experience. 
Thousands of men and women have crossed 
the Atlantic and are in the trenches, the air- 
planes, the ambulances, the hospitals, laying 
down their lives in self-denying services for 
their fellow-men, and thousands more are pre- 
paring to follow them. Doubtless the spirit 
of adventure mingles with and quickens the 



$6 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

spirit of self-sacrifice, but also the spirit of 
self-sacrifice mingles with and ennobles the 
spirit of adventure. 

A nation is made Christian, not by main- 
taining an established church, nor by building 
cathedrals, nor by writing a confession of its 
faith into its constitution. It is made Chris- 
tian by the spirit of love, service, and sacrifice. 
When did a nation ever show so much of this 
spirit of love, service and sacrifice as the 
American Nation does to-day ? The Govern- 
ment has called upon the people for thousands 
of millions of dollars to carry on the war for 
the freedom of the world, and the people 
have offered more than they were asked to 
contribute. The Red Cross has asked for 
millions to minister to the wounded on the 
fields, the sick and suffering in the hospitals, 
and the impoverished civilians in the devas- 
tated countries, and the people have offered 
more than they were asked to give. The Y. 
M. C. A. and the Y. W. C. A. have asked 
millions to aid them in social and spiritual 
services, and the people have given them more 
than was called for. They are denying them- 
selves food they prefer that they may send 
food to others who are in greater need. The 
young men and women are offering them- 
selves, and their fathers and mothers are of- 
fering their sons and their daughters, in life- 



" We Glory in Tribulations"' 57 

giving service — laying down their lives for 
peoples across the sea whom most of us have 
never seen, whose very language most of us 
cannot understand. The cross, which a few 
years ago was seen only on the breasts of a 
few ecclesiastics or on the spires of some of 
our churches, is now accepted as a symbol of 
their faith by twenty-three million members 
of the Red Cross who have the right to this 
symbol, and most of whom are wearing it on 
their persons or displaying it in their win- 
dows. Every man who wears this cross 
wears the symbol of a universal priesthood; 
every home adorned by it carries the symbol 
of Christ's Universal Church. The spirit of 
love, service, and sacrifice has burst through 
all barriers of creed and church, and is found 
to-day in the hearts and lives of Catholics and 
Protestants, Christians and Jews, believers 
and agnostics. 

And this is more than self-sacrifice; it is 
sacrificial service. We are learning by ex- 
perience what it is to suffer for the sins of 
the world, what it is for the innocent to suffer 
with and for the guilty, and how suffering re- 
deems, saves, delivers. When a nation which 
has been poisoned by a century of pernicious 
teaching makes war upon civilization, civiliza- 
tion is doomed unless there are men and 
women willing to give up all they hold dear — 



58 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

property, home, husband, wife, children, life 
itself — in brave battle against sins which 
they have never committed, for which they are 
not responsible, which they have done nothing 
to promote. Europe could not have been 
saved from a revival of Roman despotism, 
pagan alike in its philosophy and its spirit, if 
there had not been in Belgium, in France, in 
Great Britain, in Italy, in Russia, and in 
America men who were willing to suffer and 
to die for their faith in liberty. It is be- 
cause there were no such sacrificial lovers of 
liberty in Germany that Germany has been 
given over to the spirit of autocracy. It is 
because there were such sacrificial lovers of 
liberty in Russia that Russia has been set free 
from the old autocracy. 

Thus we are learning the meaning of Chris- 
tianity, both as a theology and as a spirit. 

As a theology, Christianity is the doctrine 
that there is a real battle in the universe be- 
tween good and evil, the extent and full mean- 
ing of which we need not and cannot know, 
but in which we must bear a part whether we 
will or not; and that there is One greater than 
we think, our Companion in the great cam- 
paign, who voluntarily shares with us in all 
the pains and perils of the battlefield. As a 
spirit, Christianity is reverence for our Great 
Companion, not because he is the Almighty, 



" We Glory in Tribulations " 59 

or the All-wise, but because he is our Leader 
in the sacrificial service. 

We cannot revere in God what we despise 
in our fellow-men, and in our fellow-men we 
despise the power and the wisdom which are 
used in the service of self. The greater the 
power and wisdom, the greater is our con- 
tempt for its mean and selfish possessor. 
We cannot refuse our reverence to the auto- 
cratic emperor of Germany and give it to 
God if we think of him as an Almighty King 
governing only by his power, or if we think of 
Him as without emotions and living in eter- 
nal serenity looking upon the struggles of 
mankind with placid indifference; and we can- 
not give our reverence to the exiled king of 
Belgium laying down his life for his country 
and refuse our reverence to the Galilean who 
has laid down his life for the whole world, 
nor can we give our reverence to the fathers 
and mothers who have given their sons for 
the salvation of a foreign people and refuse 
it to the All-Father who so loved the world 
that he gave for it his only begotten Son. 

Little children are sometimes great teach- 
ers because they naively express the feeling 
which they have not learned from their ill-in- 
structed elders to repress. When the French 
children knelt in the streets of Paris as the 
American troops passed through that city, 



60 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

they revered, not our wealth, nor our shrewd- 
ness, nor our power, but our sacrificial serv- 
ice ; and taught us what in our kneeling ought 
to inspire our revering. This is the reason 
why Christendom, in spite of much semi- 
pagan teaching from our pulpits, reverences, 
not an enthroned Allah in the heavens, but a 
thorn-crowned Christ upon the earth, not a 
Buddha without passions, purposes or desires, 
but a human God, a man of sorrows and 
familiar with grief. Christians find Him on 
the battlefield — a leader in its great cam- 
paign, sharing with them in the sacrificial 
service. And this experience is giving a new 
and deeper meaning to the declaration of the 
unknown writer of the book of Hebrews, 
" Without shedding of blood there is no 
remission of sin," and a broader and more 
universal meaning to the declaration of Paul, 
" I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and 
fill up on my part that which is lacking of the 
afflictions of Christ." 



SIXTH LETTER 

" THE REPUBLIC OF GOD " 

You say that you fear you have not put 
your question very clearly, that it is not very 
clear in your own mind. I think, however, 
that I understand it. Let me state it in my 
own words. 

You are satisfied that this is a just war; 
that France had a right and duty of self-de- 
fense; that Belgium had a right and duty to 
maintain her neutrality on which France had 
depended for protection; that England had a 
right and a duty to come to the defense of 
Belgium whose neutrality she had guaranteed. 
But what had Italy to do with the war? 
What had we to do with it? How is it our 
war? Have we not problems enough of our 
own without taking upon ourselves the prob- 
lems of other lands? Are we not in danger 
of forgetting the beam in our own eye in our 
excitement over what is more than a mote in 
our neighbor's eye? The President has said 
that the object of this war is to make the 
world safe for democracy. Are we so sure 
that democracy is the best form of govern- 
61 



62 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

ment that it is worth all that this war is cost- 
ing us to make France and Belgium safe for 
it? 

Have I fairly stated your perplexity? 

I might reply by saying that we did not de- 
clare war against Germany until Germany 
had made war against us; had set at nought 
international law which all civilized nations 
are under obligation to maintain; had inter- 
fered with our commerce on the high seas; 
had murdered our citizens traveling peace- 
ably on the ocean ; and had assumed the right 
to tell us how often and on what pathway we 
might traverse that ocean. But while these 
and kindred acts were the occasion, they were 
not the cause of our entering upon this war. 
These are not the facts which have set on fire 
the indignation of the American people and 
united us in the determination to conquer 
whatever it may cost. The President has 
rightly defined that cause. We believe that 
the right of Nations to be free is in peril and 
we joined with them in the defense of that 
right. We have engaged in a crusade to 
make this world a home in which God's chil- 
dren can live in peace and safety, a crusade 
far more in harmony with the spirit and will 
of Christ than the crusade to recover from 
pagans the tomb in which the body of Christ 
was buried. 



"The Republic of God" 63 

Jesus Christ has in a memorable passage 
defined for his followers the spirit which 
ought to animate the social order of the 
civilized world, which will animate their in- 
stitutions when the kingdoms of this world 
have become the Kingdom of our Lord and 
of his Christ: 

Be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your teacher, 
and all ye are brethren. And call no man your 
father on the earth: for one is your Father, even 
he who is in heaven. Neither be ye called masters : 
for one is your master, even the Christ. But he 
that is greatest among you shall be your servant. 
And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be humbled ; 
and whosoever shall humble himself shall be exalted. 

How does this differ from the motto of the 
French Republic : " Liberty, Equality, Fra- 
ternity "? How does it differ from Abra- 
ham Lincoln's definition of the purpose of our 
fathers : 

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought 
forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived 
in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that 
all men are created equal. 

There is one important difference. Jesus 
Christ recognized the Fatherhood of God and 
mated with it, perhaps I should say deduced 
from it, the Brotherhood of Man. In this 



64 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

respect he is still in advance of modern po- 
litical and social reformers. There is no 
ground that I can perceive for the faith that 
all men are brethren except the faith that we 
are all children of one Father. 

All ye are brethren: that is democracy; 
one is your Father: that is the spiritual 
foundation of democracy. 

Democracy is not a mere form of govern- 
ment. It is a religious faith. It is a spirit 
of life — a spirit of mutual regard for each 
other's interests and mutual respect for each 
other's opinions; it is government by public 
opinion; it is liberty, equality, fraternity — in 
the institutions of religion, of industry, and 
of education as well as in government; in a 
word, it is human brotherhood. We are 
not fighting to impose our political institutions 
or our political ideals on reluctant peoples. 
We are fighting to maintain the right of eager 
peoples to organize their institutions in har- 
mony with this spirit of brotherhood. We 
have joined with all the free peoples of the 
world in a stern resolve, not that all Nations 
shall be Christian, but that all Nations shall 
have liberty to be Christian if they wish. 

This human brotherhood involves four 
fundamental liberties : 

Religious liberty. 

Industrial liberty. 



" The Republic of God " 6$ 

Educational liberty. 

Political liberty. 

And these liberties are not only rights; 
they are also duties. We sometimes ought 
to forego our rights ; we never ought to aban- 
don our duties. 

I. The prophet Ezekiel, overcome by the 
vision of Jehovah in the Temple, threw him- 
self upon his face before his God. And the 
Voice said unto him, " Son of man, stand 
upon thy feet, and I will speak to thee." 

It is a fundamental right of man to stand 
upon his feet, and face, unafraid, the Al- 
mighty. This is his right because this is his 
duty. It is not right for him to allow any 
priest, church, creed, or book to stand between 
him and his heavenly Father. The priest, the 
church, the creed, the book, may help him to 
find his way to God; they may help him to 
understand his God; but they never should 
be allowed to take the place of God. God is 
not an absentee, to be interpreted only by a 
messenger or a letter. He is man's " Great 
Companion." The messenger and the letter 
are useful only as they bring the soul into 
companionship with that Companion. It is 
the right of every man to give account of 
himself to God because it is the duty of every 
man to give account of himself to God. No 
substitute can do this for him. The rec- 



66 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

ognition of this right and the fulfillment of 
this duty forbid all spiritual despotism, and 
are a sacred and solemn guaranty of spiritual 
liberty. 

This is Religious Democracy. 

2. God made this world for the habitation 
of man and has given it to him for his dwell- 
ing-place. It was not made specially for 
white men or for Anglo-Saxon men or for rich 
men or for wise men or for good men; it was 
made for all men. They are all his children. 
And they all have a right to a share in it. In 
the Father's house there is bread enough and 
to spare; why should any one perish with 
hunger? That is the question which the 
hungry in every land are asking, and they 
have a right to ask it. Society is not di- 
vinely organized when some men have so 
much that they know not how to use it, and 
others so little that they know not how to 
live. 

Whether the twin evils of luxurious wealth 
and sordid poverty are due to the rich or to 
the poor or to neither but to a vicious organ- 
ization of society I do not here consider. 
They are evils which democracy is endeavor- 
ing to cure by promoting a better distribution 
of wealth. And in doing this democracy is 
endeavoring not only to secure to all men their 
rights, but to enable all men to perform their 



" The Republic of God " 67 

duties. For it is the duty of every man to put 
into the world at least as much as he takes 
out of it, and it is the duty of society to make 
this possible for every man. 

I have met many skeptics, but never one so 
skeptical that he doubted the Biblical state- 
ment, " Naked came I out of my mother's 
womb." Coming into the world naked, it is 
clear that if we are to possess anything we 
must either produce it, accept it as a gift, steal 
it, or get it out of the common stock. Who- 
ever does not by some service of hand or 
brain or heart, by what he does or what he 
endures, by what he makes or what he says 
or what he suffers, contribute his share to the 
world's welfare, must be classed with the 
beggars, whether he is clad in rags or in 
velvet. To make such contribution is the 
right and the duty of every man. 

This is Industrial Democracy. 

3. We are in this world in the making! 
The object of life is the development of men 
and women. It is therefore the duty of 
every one to make of himself, and of every 
parent to make of his children, the best prod- 
uct possible. The Northern radical affirms 
that the Negro can be made the peer of the 
white man, and therefore ought to have the 
same education. The Southern conservative 
declares that the Negro never can be made 



68 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

the peer of the white man, and therefore 
ought not to have the same education. Both 
are guessing. What the Negro race can be- 
come after an education like that of the 
Anglo-Saxon race no one can foretell. And 
the expe iment can never be tried. For it is 
not within the power of man so to shape the 
world's destiny as to pass one race through 
the educational process through which other 
races have passed. It is neither possible nor 
desirable that the Africans or the East In- 
dians or the Chinese or the Japanese should 
become replicas of the Anglo-Saxons. 

This truth democracy recognizes, and 
therefore wherever it has gone it has estab- 
lished the public school. The object of edu- 
cation should not be to run all pupils into the 
same mold. The school should not be a 
foundry. The object should be to give to 
every pupil a chance to grow. The school 
should be a garden. Education, therefore, 
should prepare for life, which is itself the 
larger education. It should be adapted to 
the present conditions and the prospective 
needs of the pupil. The growing recognition 
of this truth has created optionalism in edu- 
cation, has added industrial training to 
academic education, has provided, as never 
before, for woman's education. To enjoy an 
opportunity for education is the right of 



"The Republic of God" 69 

every individual; to make that opportunity 
so varied as to meet the varied needs of the 
members is the duty of society; to avail him- 
self of the opportunity to make all of him- 
self that he can make is the duty of every 
individual. 

This is Educational Democracy. 

4. It is the right and duty of every man 
to govern himself. It is one object of edu- 
cation to prepare him to perform this duty. 
It is his right to determine his own destiny — 
his right because his duty. And as he must 
see with his own eyes, work with his own 
hands, and think with his own brain, so he 
must guide himself with his own judgment and 
rule himself with his own conscience. If he 
is blind, some one else must see for him; if 
he is paralyzed, some one else must work for 
him. So, if he has no judgment or no con- 
science, some one else must guide and rule 
him. But every normal man is furnished 
with eyes to see, hands to work, judgment 
to guide, conscience to rule. Such is the as- 
sumption of democracy, which holds that the 
object of all just government is to prepare the 
governed to govern himself. Democracy, 
therefore, in the family and in the school 
trains the growing child in the art of self- 
government. And democracy in the state 
throws responsibility upon the untrained citi- 



70 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

zen and is not discouraged if he blunders and 
sometimes blunders badly, for democracy be- 
lieves that the untrained voter will learn by 
his own blunders. 

This is Political Democracy. 

This is the democracy for which we are 
fighting against its resolute and remorseless 
foes. For Germany recognizes not one of 
these rights, not one of these duties. 

Germany has not political liberty. 

And the German people do not desire polit- 
ical liberty; it involves responsibilities which 
they do not wish to assume. Germany is 
autocratic not only in its form of government, 
but in the spirit of its people. Professor 
Kuno Francke, of the German Department 
in Harvard University, in an essay written 
before the war, thus characterizes the dis- 
tinction between the American and the Ger- 
man temperament : 

I think I need not fear any serious opposition if 
I designate self-possession as the cardinal American 
virtue. ... In contradiction to this fundamental 
American trait of self-possession, I designate the 
passion for self-surrender as perhaps the most sig- 
nificant expression of national German character. 

He adds that, while this passion leads the 
German at times to surrender himself to a 
great cause or sacred task, it also leads him to 



"The Republic of God" 71 

surrender himself to whims and hysterias of 
all sorts. He says : 

Nobody can be a more relentless destroyer of all 
that makes life beautiful and lovely, nobody can be 
a more savage hater of religious beliefs, of popular 
tradition, of patriotic instincts, than the German 
who has convinced himself that by the uprooting of 
all these things he performs the sacred task of sav- 
ing society. 

The events which have occurred in Bel- 
gium, northern France, Serbia, and Armenia 
since this essay of Professor Francke's was 
written furnish a tragic illustration of its 
truth. It has been demonstrated to be a cor- 
rect interpretation of German character. 

Germany has not educational liberty. 

Its teachers are appointed in the provinces 
by the King, in the Empire by the Emperor. 
The object of their appointment was with al- 
most brutal frankness defined by the Austrian 
Emperor after the overthrow of Napoleon I 
at Waterloo, in a speech to the German pro- 
fessors at Laybach : " I do not need savants 
but sturdy subjects. It is your duty to edu- 
cate the young to be such. He who serves 
me must learn what I order: he who cannot 
or who brings me new ideas can go, or I will 
dismiss him." The common people in Ger- 
many have never been taught to think for 



72 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

themselves. For at least half a century they 
have been trained to regard the authority of 
the State as the supreme authority, and obe- 
dience to its commands as the supreme virtue. 

Germany has not industrial liberty. 

It is a well recognized economic truth that 
all wealth is derived from the land. In 
America by our Homestead Law we threw 
open our agricultural lands to all the world, 
giving 1 60 acres to any individual who would 
live upon them and cultivate them; and, 
though we carelessly allowed our mines, for- 
ests, and water powers to fall into the hands 
of a few wealthy owners, we are attempting 
by our policy of conservation and of land 
taxation to correct that well-nigh fatal error. 
In Germany the ancient feudal system sur- 
vives, which puts the control of the nation's 
wealth into the hands of a landed aristocracy, 
popularly known as Junkers. Peasant pro- 
prietorship is practically unknown. 

Germany has not religious liberty. 

" Perfect love casteth out fear." It is 
equally true that fear casteth out love. The 
religion inculcated by the leaders of German 
thought and life is the religion of fear. The 
reverence demanded is for a God who is the 
ally of the military power, and the worship 
inspired if not inculcated is the worship of 
Odin, not of Christ. Bernhardi represented 



" The Republic of God " 73 

this spirit in his declaration that " Might 
proves itself the supreme Right." The 
Emperor represented it when in 1900 he put 
before his soldiers Attila, the ruthless king 
of the Huns, as the model for them to follow. 
Pastor Vorwerk represented it in his para- 
phrase of the Lord's Prayer: " Though the 
warrior's bread be scanty, do Thou work 
daily death and tenfold woe unto the enemy. 
Forgive in merciful long-suffering each bullet 
and each blow which misses its mark! " It 
is not difficult to believe the apparently well 
authenticated report, that the verse which 
I here quote, by an unnamed German poet, 
has had wide circulation and great popularity 
throughout Germany during this war. Con- 
trast these two ideals, the first this ode to 
Odin by a modern German poet, the second 
The Miniature of Christ, by Sir Oliver 
Lodge, a modern English philosopher. 

THE GERMAN GOD 

The foes of Germany, full of irony, inquire: 
" You Germans call upon God, and pray to him 
To aid you in the battle. 
So you have a God of your own, 
Whom we know not, 
A God on your side? " 

" Yes," cries all Germany, " and if you know him 
not 



74 The -Twentieth Century Crusade 

We shall tell you his name. 

The God who speaks through our guns, 

The God who shatters your fortresses, 

Who roars in the sea by our cliffs, 

Who hovers in the heavens with our aeroplanes, 

The God of our swords, who fills you with affright, 

He is the same Almighty Spirit 

Who through the centuries 

Has hovered over Germany, 

Who weaves and mixes all our lives, 

And on whom we depend. 

Odin the ancient vagabond of the clouds, 

The Odin of our fathers, it is He and no other." 

THE CHRISTIAN GOD 

Overwhelmingly and appallingly simple is the no- 
tion presented to us by the orthodox Christian 
Churches : — a babe born of poor parents, born in 
a stable among cattle because there was no room 
for them in the village inn — no room for them in 
the inn — what a master touch! Revealed to 
shepherds. Religious people inattentive. Royalty 
ignorant, or bent on massacre. . . . Then the child 
growing into a peasant youth, brought up to a 
trade. At length a few years of itinerant preach- 
ing; flashes of miraculous power and insight. And 
then a swift end: set upon by the religious people; 
his followers over-awed and scattered, himself tried 
as a blasphemer, flogged, and finally tortured to 
death. . . . Such occurrences seem inevitable to 
highest humanity in an unregenerate world; but 



"The Republic of God" 75 

who, without inspiration would see in them a revela- 
tion of the nature of God? 

We are fighting to make the world safe for 
this democracy, safe for liberty, equality, 
fraternity, safe for a community inspired by 
the faith that One is your Father, even God 
and all ye are brethren. When this cam- 
paign is ended and this safety has been se- 
cured, then each Nation will be free to enter 
on such studies, discussions and experiments 
as shall make clear what democracy means, 
that is, what it means to recognize in all men 
our brethren, in life an opportunity for mu- 
tual fellowship and mutual service, and in 
God one to be revered not for his might but 
for his love, his service and his self-sacrifice. 

This is the crusade to which your son has 
consecrated himself. Are you not glad ? 



SEVENTH LETTER 

Christ's peace 

Never before have we understood as we 
do now Paul's experience: " We are 
troubled on every side yet not distressed; we 
are perplexed but not in despair." As moths 
to the candle so we fly to the daily paper to 
increase the troubles of our mind by reading 
scenes from the terrible tragedy enacted on 
the European stage. The pathetic cry of the 
Psalmist of old is repeated in our hearts: 
" Oh, that I had wings like a dove ! Then 
would I fly away, and be at rest." 

But we have not wings and cannot fly and 
if we could, flight would not give us the rest 
we covet. We have tried that method and 
it failed. When this war burst upon Europe 
we struggled hard to persuade ourselves that 
its causes were obscure, that it was a new 
outbreak of the senseless struggle between 
ambitious, covetous, jealous rulers of the peo- 
ple, that it did not concern us, that we could 
be and ought to be neutral in thought and 
feeling as well as in official acts. And we 
76 



Christ's Peace 77 

struggled to quiet our consciences by listening 
to the soporific preachments, by press, by 
politicians, and sometimes by pulpit, urging 
that it was our duty as well as our self-inter- 
est to keep out of the war. 

But our consciences were not quieted. We 
could not read of robbery and murder upon 
an enormous scale and be unconcerned. We 
could not see treaties rudely broken, un- 
fortified cities bombarded, helpless men, 
women and children killed, peaceable mer- 
chant ships torpedoed and deliberate attempts 
avowedly made to crush the France that in 
1776 had come to our rescue, and remain 
neutral in thought and feeling. A great, 
rich nation, strong unless its cowardice made 
it weak, we could not play the part of Gallio 
and care for none of these things. We could 
not deceive ourselves with the pleasing delu- 
sion that we loved peace when we were only 
afraid of war. Our pride in our wealth and 
our numbers became our shame. The de- 
mocracy which had been our glory became our 
dishonor. Our trouble grew to be a dis- 
tress; our perplexity a despair. The day of 
peace dawned upon us on that memorable 
Good Friday when as a nation we recognized 
the truth that the battle for freedom fought 
by our kin across the sea did concern us, and 
reluctantly declared to ourselves and to the 



78 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

world that Germany was making war upon us 
and upon all civilized peoples. 

Cowardly flight from duty never leads to 
peace. Courageous fulfillment of duty never 
fails to find it. 

I read the other day the story of a boy who 
offered himself as a volunteer and was re- 
jected because of the unsoundness of his 
teeth. He went to a dentist, had them all 
extracted and a set of false teeth furnished 
him, then returned and was accepted. He 
will not be troubled by the inconveniences and 
discomforts of camp life. He will not be 
perplexed because he is ordered to disagree- 
able or perilous duty. He will not be dis- 
tressed if he is wounded or taken prisoner. 
He has given himself to the war in order that 
he may render whatever service he is called 
upon to render and to suffer whatever discom- 
forts or pains that service involves. He has 
given his life to the service of his fellow-men 
and put himself under the orders of a com- 
mander whom he does not know and may 
never see, and he will neither hesitate because 
he is ordered to the front at the imminent 
peril of his life, nor grumble because he is 
ordered to the rear to guard munitions or 
take part in hospital service. 

The difference between a true and a 
spurious religious experience is strikingly 



Christ's Peace 79 

illustrated by the contrast between the pre- 
tentious faith of the Kaiser and the unpre- 
tentious faith of Abraham Lincoln. Em- 
peror William at Berlin, March 29, 1901, 
said: "We will be everywhere victorious 
even if we are surrounded by enemies on all 
sides and even if we have to fight superior 
numbers, for our most powerful ally is God, 
who, since the time of the Great Elector and 
Great King, has always been on our side." 
Abraham Lincoln, during the darkest hours 
of the Civil War, in response to the question 
whether he was sure that God was on our side 
replied : I do not know ; I have not thought 
about that. But I am very desirous to know 
that we are on God's side. 

In false religious experience we have a 
plan which we wish to carry out; we have 
faith that it is right and wise, that is, faith 
in ourselves; and we want a silent partner 
who will enable us to carry out our plan. 
That is the measure of our faith in God. In 
true religious experience we believe with 
Hegel that " God governs the world; the 
actual work of his government — the carry- 
ing out of his plans — is the history of the 
world," and we want to help him to accom- 
plish his design. In the one case we want 
God as our ally; in the other case we want 
to be the ally of God. In the one case we 



80 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

want him to do our will; in the other case 
we want to do his will. In the one case we 
want God to fight our battles for us; in the 
other case we exult in the faith that he wants 
us to fight his battles with him. 

I read occasionally some writer who says 
that " Since God is God and right is right 
it is impossible that we should be defeated in 
this war." I do not think we shall be de- 
feated in this war. All signs seem to me to 
justify the conviction that we shall win just 
as decisive a victory as we deserve, that if we 
suffer any partial defeat it will be because we 
have grown weary of the war and are willing 
to make terms with the brigands against 
whom we are fighting. But if it should be 
otherwise, if the Kaiser should win all that 
he hoped to win, if by conquest and alliances 
he should establish a Pan-German Europe 
extending from the North Sea to the Persian 
Gulf, it would not have any tendency to shake 
my faith in God. 

To believe that God will carry out our 
plans, that he will submit himself to our 
judgments, that he will fulfill our requests, 
that he will do our will, is not to have faith 
in God. To have faith in God is to believe 
that he knows what his children need; that 
he dares to allow them to take their own 
way and learn by bitter experience the les- 



Christ's Peace 81 

son which they would not learn from teach- 
ing; and it is so to learn that lesson from 
this terrible experience that it will never have 
to be repeated. Present defeat, therefore, if 
it should come, though I repeat I think it 
hardly conceivable, would only convince me 
that God sees that the free Nations need de- 
feat in order that they may learn the lessons 
he would have us learn; among them that 
democracy will not be perfected until it be- 
comes a Brotherhood of Man, and a Brother- 
hood of Man is impossible unless founded on 
faith in the Fatherhood of God. 

Jesus Christ offers to his disciples not 
escape from the battle of life but peace of the 
spirit on the battlefield. " Come unto me all 
ye that labor and are heavy laden," he says, 
" and I will give you rest. Take my yoke 
upon you, and learn of me, for I am meek 
and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest 
unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and 
my burden is light." He offers, not escape 
from life's burdens but a yoke which will en- 
able us to bear its burdens. That yoke is 
obedience to our Heavenly Father as Christ 
w r as obedient to his Heavenly Father. It is 
making our prayer, that is the supreme desire 
of our life, that our Father's will, not ours, 
may be done. 

What would be thought of a would-be 



82 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

soldier who should offer his services on condi- 
tions such as : "I must be assured eight 
hours' sleep every night"; or, "I am very 
dependent upon regular meals and my coffee 
in the morning " ; or, " Wet feet are sure to 
give me a cold, I must guard against that." 
Conditional volunteering is as preposterous 
in life as in the army; for life also is war. 
Mr. Wells, in " God the Invisible King," puts 
with characteristic forcefulness the kind of 
volunteering required: " God takes all. 
He takes you, blood and bones and house 
and acres, he takes skill and influence and 
expectations. For all the rest of your life 
you are nothing but God's agent. If you are 
not prepared for so complete a surrender, 
then you are infinitely remote from God. 
You must go your way. Here you are merely 
a curious interloper." 

He who makes this dedication of himself, 
who realizes that life is a battle and gives 
himself unreservedly to doing his bit, will 
never be tempted to ask himself, " Is life 
worth living? " and will never complain to 
others or pity himself because his service is 
hard and its results are disappointing. He 
will not be perplexed because his companions 
in the war are called to endure great self- 
sacrifices and go through great sorrows; and 
when one after another of these life com- 



Christ's Peace 83 

rades fall at his side he will still go forward, 
unterrified, unhalted, unhesitating. " I have 
nothing to fear," says one French soldier to 
his mother. " The worst that can happen 
to me is to be killed, and to die for a noble 
cause when one is young is a great blessing." 
Writes another to his parents, " One must 
live the present without thinking of the 
future. To be nearer danger and death is to 
be nearer God, and therefore why pity us? 
Put your trust in God ! Everything happens 
according to His will, and it is ever for the 
best." The published letters from the front 
contain many similar experiences of peace in 
the midst of peril. The remedy for the 
doubts, the perplexities, the disbeliefs of a 
troubled mind is a whole-hearted consecra- 
tion to a great cause and a great Captain. 

This is very different from the faith that 
by and by this troubled life will end and we 
shall enter into our rest in Heaven. It is 
very different from the belief that " God's in 
his Heaven, all's right with the world." It 
is the faith that God is on the earth making 
all right with the world. It is the faith that 
the end which we have helped to achieve will 
at last be achieved and will be worth all that 
it costs us and all that it costs him. It is a 
faith which gives us rest here in the midst of 
the trouble. It is the faith of the Psalmist: 



84 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

" I had fainted unless I had believed to see 
the goodness of the Lord in the land of the 
living." " To see it," says John Henry 
Jowett, " in the very land which seems to be 
crowded only with convulsion, and sorrow, 
and disaster." It is the faith of the author 
of the forty-sixth Psalm — I quote from the 
Prayer Book version which I believe to be the 
true interpretation of the Psalmist's faith — 

God is our hope and strength, 
A very present help in trouble. 
Therefore will we not fear though the earth be 

moved, 
And though the hills be carried into the midst of 

the sea. 
Though the waters thereof rage and swell, 
And though the mountains shake at the tempest 

of the same. 
The rivers of the flood thereof shall make glad 

the city of God ; 
The holy place of the tabernacle of the Most 

Highest. 

Mr. Ruskin has given an eloquent descrip- 
tion of the mountain storms which strikingly 
illustrates this faith in the Psalmist: " But, 
as we pass beneath the hills which have been 
shaken by earthquake and torn by convulsion, 
we find that periods of perfect repose suc- 
ceeded those of destruction." ... u It is 
just where ' the mountain falling cometh to 



Christ's Peace 85 

naught, and the rock is removed out of his 
place,' that, in process of years, the fairest 
meadows bloom between the fragments, the 
clearest rivulets murmur from their crevices 
among the flowers, and the clustered cottages, 
each sheltered beneath some strength of 
mossy stone, now to be removed no more, 
and with their pastured flocks around them, 
safe from the eagle's stoop and the wolf's 
ravin, have written upon their fronts, in 
simple words, the mountaineer's faith in the 
ancient promise — 

c Neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction when 

it cometh ; 
1 For thou shalt be in league with the Stones of 

the Field; 
' And the beasts of the field shall be at peace with 

thee.' " 

When we look back over the history of the 
world, we see that the death of Jesus Christ, 
which to the disciples seemed the end of all 
their hopes, was the birth of Christianity, 
that the destruction of Jerusalem, which to 
the Jews seemed the end of spiritual religion, 
was but the breaking of the alabaster box 
that the perfume of its contents might spread 
throughout the world, that the decline and 
fall of the Roman Empire, which seemed to 
the men of that time to be the overthrow of 



86 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

civilization, was but the labor pains of a new 
and Christian civilization, that in our own 
country the Civil War, which at the time ap- 
peared to portend an enmity between the 
North and the South which could only be 
overcome after two or three generations, did 
in fact unite the North and the South in the 
bonds of a friendship founded on mutuality 
of respect greater than the nation had ever 
before known. Instructed by such a survey 
of the past it is not difficult for us to believe 
that the present great world cataclysm, when 
it has accomplished the divine purpose, will 
advance the world far on its road toward that 
kingdom of God which is righteousness, peace 
and joy in holiness of spirit. 

But if the sufferings which our boys must 
endure sometimes make us hesitate to enter 
upon this campaign, the sufferings which they 
must inflict appall us. They must not only 
be ready to die but they must also be ready to 
kill. 

It is true that many German children will 
be made orphans and many German wives 
will be made widows by our arms, and Ger- 
many, which four years ago was so pros- 
perous, will be left as Belgium, France, and 
Italy will be left, desolate and draped in 
mourning, and it will have lost what is the 
nation's greatest possession — honor. And 



Christ's Peace 87 

yet it is also true that we are fighting to 
emancipate Germany no less than to eman- 
cipate Belgium, France and Italy. We are 
going to make the whole world safe for the 
Brotherhood of Man — Germany no less 
than the countries which the German auto- 
cracy has attacked. And we are going to 
do it whatever it costs us and whatever it 
costs those whom we are fighting. 

When Jesus drove out from the helpless 
boy the demon that possessed him, " the boy 
became as one dead; in so much that the 
more part said, He is dead." This war must 
not end until the demon of lawless self-con- 
ceit and self-will is driven out of the German 
nation, though the nation be left as one dead 
by the very act which saves its people from 
the madness which possesses them. 

" My peace I give unto you," said Jesus 
Christ, in his farewell talk with his disciples : 
" not as the world giveth give I unto you." 
What is the difference? 

The world sometimes offers peace to the 
coward who flees from the field of battle or 
proposes conciliation and compromise with 
enemies of righteousness. Christ never! No 
more uncompromising enemy, no more vehe- 
ment repudiator of all attempts to escape con- 
flict by peace without victory does the history 
of the human race afford. We remember his 



88 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

saying to the woman taken in adultery, 
" Neither do I condemn thee." We forget 
that he adds " From henceforth sin no more." 
We remember his saying to the penitent 
brigand, " This day shalt thou be with me 
in Paradise." We forget that to the im- 
penitent brigand he offered no word of com- 
fort or consolation. We remember his 
humility in washing his disciples' feet. We 
forget his saying to Peter, " If I wash thee 
not, thou hast no part with me." We re- 
member his welcome to those who came to 
him whatever their past offenses — Matthew, 
Zaccheus, the publicans and harlots. We 
forget his rejection of the self-confident disci- 
ple : " I will follow thee whithersoever thou 
goest," but Jesus said unto him, " Foxes have 
holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the 
Son of man hath not where to lay his head." 
I wonder, did he follow the Master? We 
forget his rejection of the procrastinating 
disciple : " Suffer me first to go and bury 
my father "; but Jesus said unto him, " Let 
the dead bury their dead; go thou and preach 
the kingdom of God." We forget his re- 
jection of the irresolute disciple : " Lord, I 
will follow thee; but let me first go bid them 
farewell which are at home at my house "; 
but Jesus said unto him, " No man, having 
put his hand to the plough, and looking back, 



Christ's Peace 89 

is fit for the kingdom of God." Thousands 
of sermons have been preached on the father's 
welcome of the returning prodigal; not many 
on the fact that the father did not receive 
the prodigal till he had learned his lesson 
and come home with " I am no more worthy 
to be called thy son." Thousands of ser- 
mons have been preached on Christ's saying 
to Peter, " Thou art Peter and on this rock I 
will build my church "; very few on the say- 
ing which followed, when Peter desired to 
dissuade his Master from the cross, " Get 
thee behind me, Satan." 

There never can be peace in this world 
without victory. No man can have peace in 
himself except as he wins a victory over his 
baser appetites and passions. No city can 
maintain peace within its limits except as its 
police win and retain victory over the criminal 
population. Doing justice is the essential 
condition of peace. If a thug attacks a peace- 
ful citizen, knocks him down, robs him of 
his watch and purse, and so injures him that 
he has to go to the hospital for repairs, 
justice is not satisfied by a promise of the 
thug not to do it again. He must restore 
the stolen goods and pay the hospital charges, 
and, if necessary, be made to feel such 
" humiliation " and " sting " that he will not 
wish to repeat the crime. There can be no 



90 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

peace in the world until the prophets of false- 
hood and the corrupters and oppressors of 
their fellow-men are converted to a God of 
truth and goodness, or are utterly destroyed 
with unquenchable fire. 

In this message to the children of God the 
oldest prophet of the Old Testament and the 
Master in the New Testament unite. The 
writer of the third chapter of Genesis tells us 
that the head of the serpent shall bruise man's 
heel; but man's heel shall bruise the head of 
the serpent. Now the head of the serpent is 
erect, its forked tongue is running out, its eyes 
red with wrath, its very breath is poisonous. 
We have a difficult task to get our heel on the 
head but when we do we must grind it to 
powder. The Master in one of his farewell 
messages to his disciples says that he who 
takes up the sword shall perish by the 
sword — not by pestilence, nor by thunder- 
bolt, nor by the act of God — but by the 
sword in the hands of man. That sword has 
been given to us by our Master and we must 
not sheathe it until the Predatory Potsdam 
Gang has perished from the face of the earth. 

Not by flight nor by compromise, but by 
consecration to the completion of this task 
whatever it may cost, to us or to others, shall 
we find the peace of God which passeth un- 
derstanding. 



EIGHTH LETTER 

SHOW ME THY PATHS, O LORD 

You are of the opinion that all Christians 
would wish to follow the guidance and do the 
will of God if they could know what that 
will is; but how are we to know? The 
religious teachers of Germany affirm with 
great positiveness that it is the will of God 
that Germany should impose her superior 
Kultur upon all Europe, and the religious 
teachers of America are equally positive that 
it is the will of God that the people of Europe 
should be free from any such imposition. 
How are we to know which of these two 
opinions is right? 

This is an old perplexity. Montaigne, 
writing in the sixteenth century, maintains 
that the laws of conscience proceed from 
custom and he presents these same perplexities 
to his readers : " Such people as have been 
bred up to liberty, and subject to none but 
themselves, look upon all other forms of 
government as monstrous and contrary to 
nature. Those who are used to monarchy 
91 



92 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

do the same." How are those of us who do 
not believe that the laws of conscience are 
derived from custom but are, or ought to be, 
interpretations of the will of God, to know 
whether God purposes for his children an 
autocratic or a democratic rule, whether the 
Germans or the Allies are doing his will? 

There are two sources to which we may 
look for an answer to this question: the 
Bible; and Life. 

The Bible clearly affirms that it is the will 
of God to throw upon men the responsibilities 
of freedom, the responsibilities of choosing 
for themselves their own course in life, and 
that this is true for communities as well as 
for individuals. The history of the Nation 
in the Old Testament, the history of the 
Church in the New Testament makes this 
clear. 

God opens the way for the children of 
Israel to escape from the despotism of Egypt. 
In their flight they reach the edge of the Red 
Sea. The hosts of Pharaoh are following 
close after. The people cry out in anguished 
protests against Moses. " It were better," 
they say, " for us to serve the Egyptians than 
that we should die in the wilderness." 
Moses replies, " Fear ye not, stand still and 
see the salvation of Jehovah. . . . Jehovah 
will fight for you and ye shall hold your 



Show Me Thy Paths, O Lord 93 

peace." But Jehovah replies from the clouds 
unto Moses, " Wherefore criest thou unto 
me ? speak ye unto the children of Israel that 
they go forward." It is only as they pluck up 
their courage and press forward into the sea 
that the waters are rolled back and they pass 
in safety. Moses brings them to Mt. Sinai. 
He goes up into the mount to commune with 
Jehovah. Jehovah tells him to go back to the 
people of Israel and submit to them the ques- 
tion whether they will have Jehovah for their 
king or not " All the people answered to- 
gether and said, All that Jehovah has spoken 
we will do." Not until then does God give 
them in the Ten Commandments the consti- 
tution for their national life. After a time 
they become dissatisfied with the theocratic 
rule and ask for a king to " judge us like all 
the nations." And Jehovah says to Samuel, 
" Hearken unto the voice of the people in all 
that they say unto thee; for they have not 
rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that 
I should not be king over them." At that 
time Israel were the only free people in the 
world, the only people without a landed 
aristocracy or an hereditary monarch, and 
with a popular representative assembly. But 
they are allowed by God to abandon de- 
mocracy and organize a kingdom like the 
nations about them. Several centuries later 



94 The Twentieth, Century Crusade 

their country is overrun and they are carried 
into captivity. When God opens for them 
a door of escape and makes it possible for 
them to return to their devastated land and 
their ruined towns and cities, he leaves them 
free to take advantage of this opportunity or 
not as they choose. Many of them do re- 
turn, accepting the sacrifices involved in the 
long pilgrimage and in the colonial life, while 
others remain in the land of their captivity. 
These epochal incidents in the national life 
all serve to indicate whether the writers 
thought God willed for his people a subject 
or a free life. 

If we turn to the New Testament we find 
Christ giving to his disciples the same free 
choice and imposing upon them the same 
responsibilities. Before his ascension it is 
said he gave them this commission: " As 
the Father hath sent me, even so send I you," 
then bestowed upon them the Holy Spirit and 
told them " whose soever sins ye remit, they 
are remitted unto them; whose soever sins 
ye retain, they are retained." From that 
responsibility the Church on earth has never 
been relieved. It is left to us who are the 
disciples of Christ to abolish the sins which 
poison the life of humanity. Empowered by 
him we can do it. If we do not do it, 
those sins will remain. When we do not 



Show Me Thy Paths, O Lord 95 

do it, those sins and iniquities do remain. 
Jesus Christ is the friend and companion of 
his Church so long as it is loyal, but that 
friendship and that companionship with his 
followers, and their consequent power to do 
the work which he has given them to do, de- 
pend upon the fidelity and loyalty of his fol- 
lowers in his service. 

If we turn from the Bible to life we see 
written there the same truth. I will not at- 
tempt in this letter to trace the history of 
the world and show how it has steadily 
progressed under divine leadership toward 
freedom. I will content myself with out- 
lining very briefly the progress which I my- 
self have seen in the nearly three-quarters of 
a century of my active life. 

I was born in 1835, a little over eighty 
years ago. At that time half of the 
United States was slave territory and the 
slave power controlled the Government of 
the United States, most of the churches 
and religious institutions in the United 
States, and, to a large extent, its most in- 
fluential press. 

England was still governed by its aristoc- 
racy. There was a House of Commons, but 
it did not represent the common people. 
" About one-half of the House of Com- 
mons," wrote William Paley in his " Moral 



96 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

Philosophy," " obtained their seats in that 
assembly by the vote of the people, the 
other half by purchase or by nomination of 
single proprietors of great estates." The 
powers of this House of Commons were 
limited, since the House of Lords possessed 
an absolute veto power over all legislation. 
Labor servitude in the mines and factories of 
Great Britain was little better than in the 
slave States in this country. There was no 
provision except by charity for the education 
of the poor. 

France was under the imperialistic control 
of Napoleon III, an astute and unscrupulous 
politician. There was only the semblance of 
popular representation. The final Repub- 
lican Constitution was not framed until 1875, 
after the Franco-Prussian War. 

Italy did not exist. In that peninsula, 
once the home of a powerful empire, were 
provincial kingdoms, jealous of and hostile to 
each other. The States of the Church were 
under the control of a hierarchy which for- 
bade liberty of speech. Venice was in decay, 
strangled by the despotism of Austria. And 
the government of Southern Italy was under 
Bourbon rule, concerning which Mr. Glad- 
stone wrote in 1851, " the Government is in 
bitter and cruel, as well as utterly illegal, hos- 
tility to whatever in the nation really lives 



Show Me Thy Paths, O Lord 97 

and moves and forms the mainspring of prac- 
tical progress and improvement." 

Russia was an absolute despotism in which 
the people had no Parliamentary representa- 
tion and no rights of free press, free assem- 
bly, or free speech, nor even freedom to peti- 
tion the Czar. 

During my lifetime, that is during the last 
eighty-three years, slavery has been abolished 
in the United States, and is now nowhere 
recognized throughout the civilized world. 
The public school system has been extended 
into every State and territory of our country, 
and so developed as to afford equal benefits 
for both sexes and all classes and all voca- 
tions. The public lands have been thrown 
open to settlers by our homestead law. It is 
true that our forests, our mines, and our 
water powers have been allowed to pass under 
the control of private owners, but effectual 
reforms have been initiated to secure such 
Governmental control of these National pos- 
sessions as will conserve them for the Nation's 
use. Child labor has been forbidden, the 
right of workers to organize for the protec- 
tion of their rights and the promotion of their 
interest has been recognized by law both in 
England and the United States, and suffrage 
has been so extended that it is either abso- 
lutely free or subject to such qualifications as 



98 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

can easily be met by a reasonable degree of 
industry and thrift. 

In Great Britain the pocket boroughs have 
been abolished and the House of Commons 
has become a true representative of the com- 
mon people. The veto power has been taken 
from the House of Lords. The government 
of Ireland and of the colonies has been re- 
formed, and the English government is mak- 
ing careful efforts to derive and establish for 
them some system of self-government that 
will not hazard the national unity. 

The schools, colleges, and universities have 
been opened to men and women of all classes 
and all creeds. A free school system has 
been provided. And a system of taxation 
has been introduced which will eventually 
break up the great landed estates and so de- 
stroy the power formerly possessed by the 
feudal lords. 

France has become a free constitutional 
Republic. The control of education has been 
taken out of the hands of the hierarchy and 
put into the hands of the people. And alike 
in the United States, in England and in 
France the power to make industrial reforms 
is put absolutely into the hands of the people. 

Italy has become a great united nation and 
a free nation — the story of its emancipation 
under the triple leadership of Cavour, Gari- 



Show Me Thy Paths, O Lord 99 

baldi and Mazzini is one of the most 
romantic and inspiring chapters in the history 
of the human race. 

In Russia a revolution has overthrown the 
old bureaucracy; and though anarchy fol- 
lowed immediately after this overthrow, as I 
am writing this letter there is every reason to 
believe that the people themselves, with the 
aid of their democratic allies, will succeed in 
establishing an ordered and stable govern- 
ment. 

He who believes that history is anything 
more than merely a series of accidental hap- 
penings, who believes that there is any con- 
tinuity and coherence in history, who believes 
in any ordered social evolution, should find 
it difficult to believe that this march of the 
century toward liberty will be halted, and 
that at the command of the Hun the civilized 
world will right-about-face and travel back 
to the unendurable despotisms from which 
at such a cost they have wrought their deliver- 
ance. He who believes that God is in his 
world, that above all earthly plans and pur- 
poses there is One who gives to his children 
their ideals and inspires them with their cour- 
age, and that history is in very truth the work- 
ing out of his plans for his children, will find 
despair for the world impossible. He who 
looks back only four years may find in those 



ioo The Twentieth Century Crusade 

four years food for his doubts and discour- 
agements, but he who looks back a hundred 
years must have a great genius for pessimism 
if he can doubt in what direction the unseen 
forces are carrying the human race. 

The Bible and Life unite in testifying that 
the Kingdom of God is a Kingdom of Liberty 
and that God is the Father of a free people. 



NINTH LETTER 

CORONATION 

A friend of mine who knows General 
Pershing intimately asked him last winter 
what he regarded as the most distinctive fea- 
ture in the character of the French people. 
My friend said that General Pershing medi- 
tated for a moment and then replied: 
" Their absolute disregard of death." Con- 
ingsby Dawson sees the same characteristic 
in the English and American soldiers on the 
front. In one of his letters he writes: 

A strong man or a good man or a brainless man 
can walk to meet pain with a smile on his mouth 
because he knows that he is strong enough to bear 
it, or worthy enough to defy it, or because he is 
such a fool that he has no imagination. But these 
chaps are neither particularly strong, good, nor 
brainless; they're more like children, utterly casual 
with regard to trouble, and quite aware that it is 
useless to struggle against their elders. So they 
have the merriest of times while they can, and 
when the governess, Death, summons them to bed, 
they obey her with unsurprised quietness. It sends 
the mercury of one's optimism rising to see the way 
101 



102 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

they do it. I search my mind to find the bigness 
of motive which supports them, but it forever evades 
me. 

Yet I think he himself answers this ques- 
tion in a single sentence in another letter ex- 
pressing his own personal experience: 

" It isn't when you die that matters — it's 
how." 

To this conclusion the soldiers at the front 
have come, perhaps without knowing it; cer- 
tainly without being able to express it. 
When they entered the army they definitely 
decided that life was not too great a price to 
pay for the privilege of rendering to the 
world the service to which they were sum- 
moned. As one of them expressed it to an- 
other friend of mine, " I would rather die 
than live under the rule of the Hun." So 
" when the governess, Death, summons them 
to bed, they obey her with unsurprised quiet- 
ness," not because resistance is impossible, 
but because the summons is not unexpected. 
They have made once for all the great deci- 
sion, and death comes to them as naturally 
as life in the trenches. This is not true of 
all, but it is true of a large proportion, and 
the others catch the spirit of life from their 
comrades. For hope and life of the spirit 
are contagious no less than fear. 



Coronation 103 

" Blessed," says the sacred writer in the 
closing chapter of the Bible, " blessed are 
they that wash their robes that they may have 
the right to the tree of life." 

The right to the tree of life. Our soldiers 
disregard death because they possess a death- 
less life, and know that they possess it with- 
out being conscious of their knowledge. 
Faith which we possess we are conscious of; 
but we are often unconscious of the faith 
which possesses us. Truth which we have 
consciously acquired remains in our conscious- 
ness; but truth which has unperceived entered 
our life through our experience becomes a 
part of our character, one of the unseen forces 
which ever after shapes our thinking and con- 
trols our will. Their forgetfulness of self 
makes these soldiers as indifferent to death as 
they are to the discomforts of their camp life. 

Immortality is not a hope for the future; 
it is a present possession. Belief in immor- 
tality is not the opinion, founded on argu- 
ment, that I shall survive the body when it 
decays. It is the consciousness that I am 
more than the body which I inhabit and the 
mastery of that body by the immortal, in- 
visible personality which inhabits it. 

There never was a time when faith in the 
powers and values of this spirit was as strong 
as it is to-day. Millions of young men — 



104 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

Belgian, French, Italian, English, American 
— are carrying their mortal bodies into ex- 
periences sure to be those of great discomfort, 
liable to be those of excruciating pain. And 
there are millions of fathers^ and mothers 
who are proud that they have sons who dare 
to carry their bodies to the torture chamber. 
The world has often witnessed a like faith in 
spiritual values: a like conviction that the 
spirit of honor, patriotism, humanity, piety, is 
worth dying for. But never has it witnessed 
that faith on so great a scale. ' And never 
before has been so terribly illustrated, as Ger- 
many is illustrating in the present war, the 
effect on character of a belief that the only 
values are material values, the only prosperity 
a material prosperity, and the only force a 
material force. 

There are various arguments for immor- 
tality, but the only convincing argument is 
the possession of immortality. There are 
various artificial tests by which the Church 
has endeavored to determine who possesses 
this gift of a deathless life. One of these 
is a confession of faith in invisible and in- 
tangible realities. Another is appreciation 
of and participation in worship, the signifi- 
cance of which depends wholly on that faith. 
These ecclesiastical tests are perhaps the best 



Coronation 105 

that the wit of man could devise. But they 
are artificial. 

Life is the real test. And when a man 
deliberately gives up, in his devotion to 
the service of others, all that makes phys- 
ical life worth living, and his experience 
culminates by an eager offer of life itself for 
such intangible values as honor, courage, love, 
he affords the best possible evidence that he 
possesses immortality. This evidence may 
not be convincing; but it is far more convinc- 
ing than any of the tests which the Church has 
ever been able to contrive. He who makes 
this great renunciation thereby gives assur- 
ance that above all things which are seen and 
temporal he values the things which are un- 
seen and eternal. To him who possesses the 
deathless life death may easily appear to be 
but an incident in that life. And if he does 
not wholly disregard death, he will certainly 
agree with Coningsby Dawson that " it isn't 
when you die that matters — but how." 

Who has better grounds for sharing in 
Paul's summary of his life than our soldiers 
at the front : "I have fought the good fight, 
I have finished the course, I have kept the 
faith " ? Paul does not say that he has gained 
the victory, or won the race, or vanquished his 
doubts. In truth his letters give abundant 



106 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

evidence of the reverse. He had not gained 
the victory: " I buffet my body and bring it 
into bondage." He had not won the race: 
" Not that I have already obtained or am 
already made perfect, but I press on." He 
had not vanquished his doubts : " perplexed 
yet not unto despair." Who of us in pew or 
pulpit in our churches at home have fought 
a more courageous fight, or continued more 
unflinchingly to the end in our course, or main- 
tained a more unshaken loyalty in spite of 
perplexity than these soldier boys in the 
trenches? Who of us has better met the 
test of hard experience or furnished better 
evidence that by our mastery of the body by 
the spirit we have a claim to the tree of life? 
What is it to wash our robes in the blood of 
the Lamb but to share his spirit of sacrifice 
and give our life for the life of the world as 
he gave his life for the life of the world? 
Who have done this more simply, more 
sincerely, more devotedly than the soldiers 
who have offered their lives, not merely for 
their country but for an unknown people, of a 
different land, a differentlanguage and often 
of a different religious faith? What the Be- 
yond may have for them we do not know and 
cannot guess. But we may be very sure that 
whatever may have been their faults or their 
transgressions here below, the righteous 



Coronation 107 

Father will not refuse to these heroic cross- 
bearers the crown of righteousness. 

Do not imagine that I think the soldier 
earns heaven by dying for a great cause, any 
more than I think his brother at home earns 
it by accepting a creed and taking part in a 
sacrament. Heaven is not for sale. I be- 
lieve with Paul that God gives eternal life to 
all those who by patient continuance in well- 
doing seek for glory and honor and immor- 
tality; and we may well believe that he who 
gives his life for the life of the world puts 
glory and honor and immortality above the 
honors, the emoluments and the pleasures of 
this mortal life. 

Coningsby Dawson writes his mother, 
" Your prayers weave round me a mantle of 
defense." You can weave round your boy 
this mantle of defense while he is still here 
where he can sometimes hear from you and 
you can sometimes hear from him and he can 
know that you are praying for him. But if 
the great silence should come, what then? 
Must you cease praying for him? Surely 
not. The object of your prayer is not to let 
your heavenly Father know of your need or 
your son's need. " Your Father knoweth 
what things ye have need of before ye ask 
him." Nor is it to awaken his interest in 



108 The Twentieth Century Crusade 

your son by your pleadings. If not a spar- 
row falls to the ground without your Father, 
can you think his children fall by thousands 
in this great harvest of death and he does 
not care ? Prayer is talking with God. It is 
carrying to him our joys and our sorrows, 
our victories and our defeats, our laughter 
and our tears. It is inviting him to share 
with us our life that we may share with him 
his life. Surely we should not shut him out 
from sharing our deepest experiences, nor 
shut ourselves out from him in the hour of 
our greatest need. Surely he who craved the 
companionship of his three dearest friends in 
his Gethsemane can understand our craving 
his fellowship in our Gethsemane. " Yea, 
though I walk through the valley of the 
shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou 
art with me." How can he be with me if I 
do not invite his companionship? 

After the death of my wife I found among 
her papers the prayer given below. It is 
said to have been written by Mr. Gladstone 
on the death of his son and subsequently used, 
with some modification, at his own burial in 
Westminster Abbey in May, 1898. As I do 
not find in Mr. John Morley's life of Glad- 
stone any reference to this prayer, I am not 
sure that the newspaper report of its author- 



Coronation 109 

ship is correct. But it seems to me an ex- 
pression of faith as beautiful in its frankness 
as in its reverence and as beautiful in its child- 
like simplicity as in its beauty of expression: 

A PRAYER FOR A FRIEND OUT OF SIGHT 

O God, the God of the spirits of all flesh, in 
whose embrace all creatures live, in whatsoever 
world or condition they be; I beseech Thee for 
him whose name and dwelling place and every need 
Thou knowest. Lord, vouchsafe him light and 
rest, peace and refreshment, joy and consolation, in 
Paradise, in the companionship of saints, in the 
piesence of Christ, in the ample folds of Thy great 
love. 

Grant that his life (so troubled here) may un- 
fold itself in Thy sight, and find a sweet employ- 
ment in the spacious fields of eternity. If he hath 
ever been hurt or maimed by any unhappy word or 
deed of mine, I pray Thee of Thy great pity to heal 
and restore him, that he may serve Thee without 
hindrance. 

Tell him, O gracious Lord, if it may be, how 
much I love him and miss him and long to see him 
again ; and, if there be ways in which he may come, 
vouchsafe him to me as a guide and a guard, and 
grant me a sense of his nearness, in such degree as 
Thy laws permit. 

If in aught I can minister to his peace, be pleased 
of Thy love to let this be; and mercifully keep me 
from every act which may deprive me of the sight 



no The Twentieth Century Crusade 

of him as soon as our trial-time is over, or mar the 
fullness of our joy when the end of the days hath 
come. 

Pardon, O gracious Lord and Father, whatsoever 
is amiss in this my prayer, and let Thy will be 
done; for my will is blind and erring, but Thine is 
able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we 
ask or think; through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Amen. 

As this war goes on the number of fathers 
and mothers, brothers and sisters, wives and 
friends bereft and unutterably lonely will be 
multiplied. I wish that this prayer, or one 
conceived in the same spirit, might be used in 
the service of every church from which any 
son has gone forth never to return because 
he has laid down his life that the world may 
be a home in which God's children may live 
as brethren in peace and safety. 



THE E,ND 



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